RE: FW: [xml-dev] ANN: White Paper - "Using OWL to Avoid Syntacti cRig or Mortis"

 (Hunsberger, Peter) writes:
>Yes, but the fact that in the past computers have not been good at
>this does not mean that people shouldn't be playing with finding
>someway of making computers good at this!  Once upon a time computers
>weren't very good at understanding anything not written in machine
>language...

I'm not sure I share your enthusiasm for computer-mediated meaning.  

I have serious doubts about how useful such things are, few of which are
improved by the naive belief in expert-asserted truth statements being
reliably useful that seems to form the underpinnings of such projects,
not to mention the marketing that goes along with them.

It seems to me that it would be far better to include humans in such
work rather than exclude them over time, which seems to have been a
common goal for the past fifty years of computing.  Of course, you do
have to pay people in something other than electrons, and trust them,
and those human weaknesses seem to motivate the funders of these
projects.

Will it happen in my lifetime?  Well, hopefully I'll be out of computers
by then.


-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org