[SCL] new draft

[pat hayes]

>Pat,
>
>>  But you really do seem to be alone in this,
>>  John. I think you may be able to get over it in time.
>
>Please look in the mirror.  Nobody but you likes
>the word "ontology" as a synonym for a set of
>sentences.

Nobody else in the group, rather to my surprise, I have to admit. 
But I am aiming to talk to a rather wider audience.

>  So far, Bill and Tanel, have suggested
>"theory" as first choice or "module" second.
>Either one is a meaningful two-syllable word,
>not a misused four-syllable malapropism.

Clearly you would be a proscriptive linguist, while I would be a 
descriptive one. I don't give a rat's ass whether you or anyone else 
thinks that a word is being 'MISused'; my only concern is with how it 
is, in fact, being used.

>
>>  No, they use it to refer to a set of logical sentences
>>  in some document, typically one that is transmittable
>>  over a network.  I use it in this way myself.
>
>Just because there are idiots who don't know their
>A from their elbow does not mean we should kiss up
>to them.

When there are between 100,000 and 1,000,000 of these idiots ,and 
when they include such total boneheads as, say, Ian Horrocks, Peter 
Patel-Schneider, Frank Harmelen and most of the AI Fellows who are 
active in the area, we might have the humility to use what has become 
the 'standard' terminology rather than trying to rap the entire 
planet's knuckles for not being obedient schoolchildren.

I have to say, your attitude as expressed here is only hardening my 
determination not to kiss up to the reactionary minority of grizzled 
logical purists who think of themselves as guardians of Correct 
Language.

>Their usage is not likely to outlive the
>so-called semantic web -- i.e., 2 years at best.

I will simply ignore this comment with a wry smile. Already the SW 
community is larger than, say, the union of the TP and CG communities 
by one or two orders of magnitude, and it is not going to go away or 
even be outlived; its already making too much money. This usage of 
'ontology' has been standard in academic AI/KR now for about a decade 
in any case.

>Ditto for skin.

OK, Ive given up on skin already. It was only a kind of joke in any 
case. "Dialect", OK?

Pat


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