Hiya,

The question of whether there can be one ontology for any given field
is one that I have already encountered in the field of learning
object metadata.

It is, indeed, a question that has been encountered especially in 20th
century philosophy of language, so there are good grounds from which
to arrive at an informed opinion.

I deal with the question in this presentation:
One Standard for All: Why We Don't Want It, Why We Don't Need It
(It is a PowerPoint (sorry) but it reads like a paper)

http://www.downes.ca/files/one_standard.ppt

I think that the essential point that emerges in such discussions is
that it is not merely a question of language. It is not possible to
simply identify a set of terms and agree on them.

Disagreements in language can be traced to disagreements in a wide
variety of underlying hypothesis, among them including ontology
(Quine), causation (Hanson), explanation (van Fraassen),
categorization (Lakoff) and meaning (Wittgenstein). These five
factors (among others) create a context of discourse, and it is the
context of discourse (the 'pragmatics' (Morris)) that changes the
meanings of the terms in question, changes the very language of
discourse.

Because there is no way around this (aside from a regime of
ontological authoritarianism) any system of representation must adapt
to this, learning, deploying, and teaching new vocabularies, new
semantics, as the need arises.

-- Stephen

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Stephen Downes ~ Researcher ~ National Research Council Canada
Moncton ~ Canada ~ stephen@... ~ http://www.downes.ca
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