[Om] Adopting the VoCamp idea? (Meeting series for creating lightweight vocabularies)

[Christoph LANGE]

Hi Paul,

  maybe you got me wrong.  First of all, I like this whole idea in a very
general sense: that people meet and work together on a -- whatever, in our
case it would be CDs, of course.

On Tuesday 30 September 2008 04:14:09 Paul Libbrecht wrote:
> I tend to misconsider groups that name their subjects vocabularies
> since they generally represent the "ontology-is-too-complex" camp
> which uses this argument to avoid standardization in many respects.

Not at all.  On the one hand, we should admit that OpenMath CDs are indeed not
the most complex way of representing mathematical knowledge.  We don't even
have formal definitions (DefMPs) so far.  The mathematical counterpart to the
thing the semantic web people would call an ontology is probably something
like the formal library of a theorem prover.

On the other hand, many of the VoCamp initiators are experienced in
engineering formal and complex ontologies.  They are not afraid of
standardization, but they know that for many domains standards just don't
exist (yet), so they want to get some effort started.  As I said, the result
of a VoCamp would be a first seed, which will then either die or be subject to
some standardization process.

> (look at http://www.eurydice.org/ for example).

What do you mean, what part of the homepage should I have a look at?  Well, I
see sections like "glossary" and "thesaurus".  Of course, there I agree with
you that we want to have something more formal, but that doesn't contradict
the idea of a VoCamp at all.

Cheers,

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Lange, DERI Galway/Jacobs Univ. Bremen, http://kwarc.info/clange

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