Gender and Subjective Views in the Semantic Web
You know the Semantic Web is mature when it is subject to gender studies.
Marion Fugléwicz-Bren (the public relations representative of semantic web company) interviewed Corinna Bath, a researcher and lecturer, about gender studies and Semantic Web.
The arguments are valid, going along the lines that social group and background influence the interpretation of reality. Its interesting to see what the problems are, and possible solitions, from her view:
three quotes I need for an argument:
Another line of thinking about gender and the Semantic Web is feminist epistemology, which questions traditional approaches in pointing out that there is no “real meaning”. According to these findings knowledge is always historically and culturally situated.
Hence, in contrast to its own agenda CYC ignores minority views, quieter voices, and allows the dominant voice to speak for everyone, which seems highly problematic.
Even the modelling concepts themselves should be questioned as Cecile Crutzen suggest, since e.g. the class concept and the inheritance concept lack to represent social processes, because of limited formal expressiveness for conflict, change and fluidity. Such an ontology abstracts from human sociality, situated action and real meaning construction processes.
The views are also supported by constructivistic philosophy (which I basically agree with and adhere to in my own work on Personal Information Models) with the core principle that reality is constructed inside the individual based on sensory input.
The suggestion to contextualize statements and ontologies is also right. Technial there are two problems: inference and identification. The problem is that inference as-is-now is already a hard problem, and using localized/contextualized ontologies as done by Stefan Decker and Michael Sintek in their 2002 Micro-Inference approach in TRIPLE (or by Nepomuk's NRL theory) makes the problem even harder.
Second, if a user would benefit from a contextualized ontology, the user would have to identify himself and give away information about his social context, gender, sexuality, nationality, preferences, which is a privacy problem.
So - who comes up with a solution? TRIPLE with FOAF and SIOC?
Marion Fugléwicz-Bren (the public relations representative of semantic web company) interviewed Corinna Bath, a researcher and lecturer, about gender studies and Semantic Web.
The arguments are valid, going along the lines that social group and background influence the interpretation of reality. Its interesting to see what the problems are, and possible solitions, from her view:
three quotes I need for an argument:
Another line of thinking about gender and the Semantic Web is feminist epistemology, which questions traditional approaches in pointing out that there is no “real meaning”. According to these findings knowledge is always historically and culturally situated.
Hence, in contrast to its own agenda CYC ignores minority views, quieter voices, and allows the dominant voice to speak for everyone, which seems highly problematic.
Even the modelling concepts themselves should be questioned as Cecile Crutzen suggest, since e.g. the class concept and the inheritance concept lack to represent social processes, because of limited formal expressiveness for conflict, change and fluidity. Such an ontology abstracts from human sociality, situated action and real meaning construction processes.
The views are also supported by constructivistic philosophy (which I basically agree with and adhere to in my own work on Personal Information Models) with the core principle that reality is constructed inside the individual based on sensory input.
The suggestion to contextualize statements and ontologies is also right. Technial there are two problems: inference and identification. The problem is that inference as-is-now is already a hard problem, and using localized/contextualized ontologies as done by Stefan Decker and Michael Sintek in their 2002 Micro-Inference approach in TRIPLE (or by Nepomuk's NRL theory) makes the problem even harder.
Second, if a user would benefit from a contextualized ontology, the user would have to identify himself and give away information about his social context, gender, sexuality, nationality, preferences, which is a privacy problem.
So - who comes up with a solution? TRIPLE with FOAF and SIOC?
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leobard - 6. Aug, 09:24
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CYC quote
That was known
read here
http://leobard.twoday.net/stories/5178859/