[Sigia-l] Topic maps and IA

[Listera]

"Jonathan Broad" wrote:

> With all due respect, OWL and topic maps are not the same kind of thing
> as a relational database.  They're all data abstractions, true, but
> they function at a fundamentally different *level* of abstraction.

We covered this subject here in some detail over a year ago so I won't go
into too much detail.

I'm not arguing that they are identical. In fact, my comments were less
about technology than about IA's ability to reach out to other professions,
as they need to work with them on complex/corporate projects.

What I am saying is that the notion of intermediation of data structures by
creating virtual layers of exchange is not new at all. I hope we agree on
this.

Now, corporate/large-scale data often resides in an RDBMS. A category of
people attend to the creation, access and maintenance of that data. This
field is much older than digital IA. If you want to talk to them it pays to
a) know their language and b) be able to communicate with them through not
the latest alphabet soup of 'standard' of the month, but more fundamental
notions of abstraction they are all familiar with. One way to make friends
in a corporate room full of data/dev guys is not to start the conversation
with words like "ontology" and "faceted" even though the fundamentals of
those notions won't be foreign to them.

> The terminology you object to isn't new, it's probably the longest part of the
> history of artificial intelligence research.

My point exactly; one way to lose friends in that corporate room full of
data/dev guys is, in fact, to bring up the subject of artificial
intelligence. :-)

At least, we agree that we shouldn't have to deal with data at the RDBMS/SQL
level. But tools of abstraction have been around for a long time,
object-relational frameworks that map raw data structures to objects, for
example, have gone through many generations over the last decade or two,
without using words like "ontology" and "faceted" even.:-)

Ziya
Nullius in Verba