The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview (2003)
karmak.org
karmak.org
> As more groups from Flight Operations hear about the EVA Wiki, they are requesting to start their own wiki. As of August 2015 there are 7 groups with wikis. Eventually every group will have their own wiki. One of the long-range goals is to enable inter-wiki semantic data transfer, as appropriate based on access restrictions.
The last sentence in particular got me. It's always a long-range goal :)
See https://mediawiki.org/wiki/EMWCon_Spring_2019/Creating_the_I... for a talk about why and how we merged wikis after learning the hard way.
I link to other videos and info about our work on my user page: https://mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Darenwelsh
I need to start exploring the stats again as we're celebrating 10 years this coming November.
We are also fortunate that we can do real inference, entity detection & disambiguation these days. Perhaps one day we will have intelligent tools that all web publishers will have at their fingertips allowing them to press a button to confirm detected entities and relationships they present in their webpages (kind of like photos apps these days allow you to confirm known peoples faces). There will likely be an incentive for making their content easier to find. That would be awesome.
However, I do take his point that world views differ for a good reason. I hope we won't be constrained by some limited ontology that these tools might present.
The limitations are well understood
> - The creator of shirky.com lives in Brooklyn
> - People who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent
> You could conclude from this pair of assertions that the creator of shirky.com pronounces it "shoiky.com."
If you use faulty assumptions, you can conclude a lot. Universal reasoning really doesn't swing that well with reality, is what we can conclude.
"You could conclude from this pair of assertions that the creator of shirky.com pronounces it "shoiky.com." This, unlike assertions about my physical location, is false. It would be easy to shrug this error off as Garbage In, Garbage Out, but it isn't so simple. The creator of shirky.com does live in Brooklyn, and some people who live in Brooklyn do speak with a Brooklyn accent, just not all of them (us)."
"Each of those statements is true, in other words, but each is true in a different way. It is tempting to note that the second statement is a generalization that can only be understood in context, but that way madness lies. Any requirement that a given statement be cross-checked against a library of context-giving statements, which would have still further context, would doom the system to death by scale."
And it continues a bit more about generalities.
You can agree or disagree with that take, but your comment makes it sound like the author used this dodgy reasoning, which only appears like that because you lifted a very narrow part of the article and removed the context. It's an extremely unfair characterisation you're making here. You can make almost any article look bad by this.
However, in a formal framework of pure deduction we have no moderation of truth. Either a sentence is true or it is not (or it is non-deducible).
The sentence `some people who live in Brooklyn do speak with a Brooklyn accent` is not coercible to `People who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent`.
I follow his argument that a syllogistic world view is not practical in a distributed, collaborative semantic web sense. But this is kind of far away from his statement: "Syllogisms are Not Very Useful".