I haven’t covered the 300,000 product descriptions offered by this site because I could not choose a blog title between “castles made of sand” and “blowing in the wind.”
From the webpage:
Your idea sucks: What you call an ontology is no ontology, because it lacks an axiomatic theory.
First, this is not question but a statement. Second, yes, you are absolutely right: Besides the rdfs:subClassOf axiom, we don’t have any formal semantics for each class. Third: Your ontology lacks
- social grounding (ours: constant challenging by millions of reviews and revisions),
….
The line: social grounding (ours: constant challenging by millions of reviews and revisions) captures the problem doesn’t it?
Your classes are constantly changing and so I won’t know if your class tomorrow means the same thing when I used it today. (Hence, the “castles made of sand” line as a possible header.)
Yes?
But, social grounding is at work on both ends, that is my use of an identification has a social grounding.
So we have an uncertain/changing meaning to your classes, being applied to and equally uncertain/changing meaning to my application of your class. (Hence, the “blowing in the wind” line as a possible header.)
There is other information about each of the “300,000” (is that a possible movie title?) classes, but we don’t know what information has to match to identify a particular class. Or to tell others why we used one class and not another.
Appreciate the social grounding but identifiers without more leave sand moving under our feet and don’t enable us to make meaningful statements about our choices of identifiers.
*****
PS: Show of hands your preference for “Castles Made of Sand” or “Blowing in the Wind” as a title.
PPS: Best of luck with the axiomatic critics. Axioms are all they have, how does that go, “…tis an ill-favored thing, Sir, but mine own”? Something like that.