© Roger M Tagg
Sorry for the wordy home page. Here is an attempt at a simpler explanation.
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Every day people throw lots of words at us. We may feel that living in the world ought to be a simple matter, but "civilization" has brought with it layers and layers of complexity. There must be far more words spent on talking about ideas, theories, predictions, doctrines, laws, games, computer programs etc than there are about workaday things like food, water, trees, rocks, pains and emotions. |
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If you think like I do, you may suspect that you are not always getting an unbiased story form people who tell you things. Most of us are conscious of that fact that we live in an age of "spin" - the business of using words that make black sound like white, in order to support whatever motives the speakers or writers have. |
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That's why my aim is to find some way of countering all the bullshit that is thrown at us. We need to be able to "read between the lines". We should ask "who is this guy, who is paying him or her, what is he or she trying to get?" But this means a bit more effort than just taking things at face value. We need to fill in what hasn't been said. |
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One weapon that we have today, that we didn't have 20 years ago is the Internet - and with it the World Wide Web. I see it as a weapon against bullshit because you can almost always find a view on the internet that tells you reasons WHY some opposite view is just as good. No wonder dictators and one-party states don't like the Internet. |
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However the Internet is about more than just hawking different opinions. It's also a great medium for commerce. If you are reading this, you have probably heard of eBay, and you may know that lots of business is now done over the Internet. For many purposes there may be no risk of misunderstanding between buyers and sellers, but when it gets to subtle differences between products and services, traders find that they need some way to resolve subtle differences in descriptions of what is being traded. This needs more than just a common use of English (or Chinese or some other language). It needs a more formal definition of these products and services. That's where "ontologies" come in. One of the best known early examples is the one built by the US Department of Defense in a system called DAML. |
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The idea of making up my own "ontology" came to me in the days when I worked with people who normally spoke many different languages, and we often had to spend time resolving subtle differences in meaning which could result in misunderstandings. I realized that despite the misunderstandings, we usually had the same idea of what it was all about. However what was more interesting was to discover "where those guys were coming from". |
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However, I found that it isn't just a matter of using a dictionary to look up words for objects. We needed to talk about the relationships between one thing and another. That's the reason why what I am offering here is rather different from other approaches - it's "Relationship-Oriented" as well as being "Language Insensitive". |
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This version updated on 27th January 2010
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .