Presentation, with a faltering start, but some good insights about half way in about the Semantic Web and the "trouble with ontologies", given recently by David Weinberger at Harvard University's Berkman Centre:
My topic wasn't why you really should tidy up your office. (You know you should.) It's about knowledge and why we have thought neatness is a sign of a proper understanding of a topic, why it's good that our mental categories are messy, what Aristotle got wrong, and whether the Semantic Web is too much of a fuss-budget for its own good.
This is an important theoretical road. He picks up on Wittgenstein's attack on Aritotelian Categories and explains why over-categorisation and top-down methods of knowledge classification so often fail. A general theory of 'messiness' is a fascinating idea - but not new. The idea that all knowledge is incorrigible was put forward in a groundbreaking paper by Quine [see http://www.wvquine.org/], the difference is the way in which the real world is experimenting and playing with this concept, mainly via the internet. This debate lifts education and training theory to anoter theoretical plane - way above and beyond most of the third rate research we normally see in the field.
Posted by: Donald Clark | 11/05/2006 at 09:15