Global Standards for Knowledge Representation

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 16 Dec 2022 12:22
Open in Logseq
    • Do not exist. This is what the Semantic Web was supposed to be, but I think pretty much everybody thinks of it as an embarrassing failure at this point.
    • This is a shame because we need something like this. Not necessarily a universal ontology, but a universal way to create, share, and use ontologies – that would make computing so much better! Software could be so much smarter! But no, nothing like that has ever managed to take off.
    • One reason is that computer technologists are very good at standardizing syntax and structure, but seem to go off the rails when trying to standardize semantics. This is not really their fault, it reflects that these are very different problems and probably require different approaches and skilllsets.
    • I'm thinking also of Cyc, an earlier and more centralized effort to build a universal knowledge base, also seems like a failure, even though its goals and methodology were quite different than those of the Semantic Web.