Re: [topicmaps-comment] Everchanging subjects [Re: Notionshaveexistence ...]

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

Remember, when I weighed in on this thread, I said that I had decided to
avoid all the difficult philosophical questions by operating as if concepts
were in fact platonic?  Well, it's obvious that I don't think that they are,
so how can I reconcile entertaining two such different viewpoints?  Easy, I
have a physics background!

But in fact, most of the structuralist, interconnected, shifting stuff goes
on transparently, doesn't it? In everyday life, we are not usually aware of
those things going on, unless we have studied hard or otherwise sensitized
ourselves.  So for people, it's not so hard to get along while being
flexible.

 I think the machine aspect, the good old semantic web stuff, is a different
story, though.  But here, as I said in my last post, I expect that a lot of
the processing will be of a more formal nature, in which the "real meaning"
of the subjects won't necessarily matter so much.  I'm much less confident
of this, though, and I'm very interested to hear what you all have to say
about it.  Do you think that machine processing will be/should be/has to be
very different in its essence from human use of the same topic maps?



[Murray Altheim]


> This said, the idea that subjects are somehow *not* intimately and
> inextricably interlinked seems a bit hard to fathom. I don't think
> of this as a difficulty for topic maps, taxonomic or ontological
> systems in general, though it's certainly something to keep in mind.

> BTW, it doesn't seem surprising that there is a strong affinity
> between what's happening with topic maps and conceptual graphs, and
> Mary Keeler's PORT group (Peirce Online Resource Testbed), which is
> why I'm quite happy to be involved there:

Oh, good, I'm going to go look at your links.  I thought most of that Pierce
activity had faded away.  Thanks, Murray.

Cheers,

Tom P