Ontological Engineering

I accept that real world is hopelessly intertwingled, everything is related to everything, etc, etc. But I see ontology as a tool to prune those connections down to purposeful buckets and helpful categories instead of “true” ones. Ontology should start from a well-defined, pragmatic purpose.

But you’re welcome to do it for fun (and share them!).

Metadata

Do we throw out metadata, then?

Of course not. Metadata can be quite useful, if taken with a sufficiently large pinch of salt. The meta-utopia will never come into being, but metadata is often a good means of making rough assumptions about the information that floats through the Internet.

Certain kinds of implicit metadata is awfully useful, in fact. Google exploits metadata about the structure of the World Wide Web: by examining the number of links pointing at a page (and the number of links pointing at each linker), Google can derive statistics about the number of Web-authors who believe that that page is important enough to link to, and hence make extremely reliable guesses about how reputable the information on that page is.

This sort of observational metadata is far more reliable than the stuff that human beings create for the purposes of having their documents found. It cuts through the marketing bullshit, the self-delusion, and the vocabulary collisions.

Taken more broadly, this kind of metadata can be thought of as a pedigree: who thinks that this document is valuable? How closely correlated have this person’s value judgments been with mine in times gone by? This kind of implicit endorsement of information is a far better candidate for an information-retrieval panacea than all the world’s schema combined. Cory Doctorow, Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia

Metaphor

In fact, metaphors were central to the XP methodology. A metaphor “helps everyone on the project understand the basic elements and their relationships.” And they are especially useful for high-level design:

Architecture is just as important in XP projects as it is in any software project. Part of the architecture is captured by the system metaphor. If you have a good metaphor in place, everyone on the team can tell about how the system as a whole works.

Instead of exhaustive design, Beck wanted just enough design. His system metaphor was something that could be explained in a moment, and was robust to change. It was a pane of frosted glass, a locus. Zach Tellman, the death of the architect

processes vs. things

We challenge the widespread presumption that matter and objects are ontologically prior to processes and events, and also the less widespread but increasingly popular view that processes and events are ontologically prior to matter and objects. Instead we advance a third view according to which each of these pairs of categories is ontologically dependent on the other. In particular, taking a cue from an ontology of devices, we identify the object as an interface between those processes which are internal to it and those which are external to it and which it may be said to enact, thereby linking objects intrinsically to the processes in which they are involved as well as providing a more powerful determinant of object identity than more traditional, non-dynamic criteria based on demarcation from the environment. The internal processes are themselves external processes in relation to the components of the object which enact them, leading to a potentially open-ended recursive decomposition of both objects and processes in a complex web of mutual interdependency. Antony Galton and Riichiro Mizoguchi. The Water Falls but the Waterfall does not Fall: New perspectives on Objects, Processes and Events

Whereas Humans view computers as tools below them to which they give orders and that do their bidding, Houyhnhnms view computing as an interaction within a system around them that extends their consciousness. Humans articulate their plans primarily in terms of things: the logical and physical devices they build (sometimes including tools to make more tools), in the lower realms of software and hardware. Houyhnhnms weave their conversations foremost in terms of processes: the interactions they partake in, that they attempt to automate (including these conversations themselves), which always involves wetware first. In short, Humans have computer systems, Houyhnhnms have computing systems. François-René Rideau, Chapter 1: The Way Houyhnhnms Compute