<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote at 03/05/2011 02:15 PM: <blockquote cite="mid:AANLkTiktWr5RpVXkEhFbDVKS1UCadQSjo6XDME8LyY9-@mail.gmail.com" type="cite"> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Also, in addition to the ambiguous "people lie," I'd add "ontological/knowledge engineering is hard."  I think that malice and incompetence should be considered two separate problems that don't necessarily have exactly the same solution. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> The "and" was meant as a separator. <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm">http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm</a> </pre> </blockquote> <br> Then I say that laziness, incompetence, and malice are three separate problems.<br> <br> And I see that Cory Doctorow identified this with his unquoted third problem, "People are stupid."  He's talking about competence at expression, which, when generalized to Semantic Web, might include ability to distinguish concepts like "has-a" and "is-a."  I saw in the early '90s that pretty simple static object-modeling confounded eluded a surprising number of people, even after they received some instruction, and similar difficulty was found in the fields of Knowledge Representation and Knowledge Acquisition.  (If one has ever had the misfortune of reading YouTube comments, one might despair that we'll ever achieve even basic literacy by 20th century standards, nevermind what we think is required for 21st century expression on the Web.)<br> <br> These problems, and others, are not insurmountable.  TeachScheme and the like will help.  Smarter approaches for the Semantic Web will also help.<br> <br> <div class="moz-signature">-- <br> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.neilvandyke.org/">http://www.neilvandyke.org/</a> </div> </body> </html>