Last week I mentioned that we are facing a critical shortage of both logicians and ontologists: Alarum – World Wide Shortage of Logicians and Ontologists.
This is the first of a number of posts on what we can do, facing this tidal wave of data with nary a logician or ontologist in sight.
I have a question that I think we need to answer before we get to the question of semantics.
Is it fair to say that identification comes before semantics? That is we have to recognize something (whatever that may be) before we can talk about its semantics?
I ask because I think it is important to take the requirements for data and its semantics one step at a time. And in particular to not jump ahead of ourselves with half-remembered bits of doggerel from grade school to propose syntactic solutions.
Or to put it differently, let’s make sure of what order steps need to be taken before we trip over our own feet.
That would be the requirements phase, as is well known to the successful programmers and startup folks among the audience.
So, is requirement #1 that something be recognized? Whether that is a file, format, subject of any sort or description. I don’t know but suspect we can’t even use logic on things we have yet to recognize.
Just to give you a hint about tomorrow or perhaps the next day, I have meetings tomorrow, can something be recognized more than once?
This may seem like a slow start but the time will pass more quickly than you think it will. There are a number of “perennial” issues that I will argue can be side-lined, in part because they have no answer other than personal preference.
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