xml-dev - Re: Ontologies

["W. E. Perry" <wperry@fiduciary.com>]

"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote:

> I believe that is "black box" testing.

Testing?! Sure, I guess we can test as a black box every node whose expertise we
might want to incorporate into a larger construct, but this is identical to the
process of *using* that node.

Tim Bray wrote:

> W. E. Perry wrote:
> >In fact, aren't we ready to go the whole
> >way and acknowledge that the ontologies addressable at the nodes of a
> semantic
> >web must in fact *be* executable against the various inputs we put to them?
>
> What does that mean?
>
> I suspect I disagree, but the proposition as
> stated has too many potential interpretations. -Tim

Apologies for the tentative and (rhetorically) interrogative presentation. I
understand the proposition of this thread (and perhaps of the Semantic Web) to
be that we fashion a logically interdependent network of nodes, each of which
contributes some portion of the larger ontological construct. Fine. In
operation--as its function--what does each of those nodes *do*? How does this
thing work? The only design which seems workable to me is that someone who wants
to use the expertise of these nodes, perhaps in some unique combination,
formulates a processing plan under which he submits some input to one of these
nodes and pipelines the successive outputs until the hoped-for value added has
been achieved. Does anyone have a fundamentally different concept of the
workflow of a semantic web?

Respectfully,

Walter Perry