5 ms·

Ontologies don't seem to scale well as you try to describe more stuff.

• rdtsc 17y ago
  I would say that ontologies built by hand won't scale well. It would take humans to understand ontologies perfectly and consistently to build a good ontology. But humans don't understand ontologies that well, it is just not how we think. In the sense that one person's interpretation might be different than another person's. So which interpretation should be encoded in the system? I probably should qualify the above by saying that lower level and domain specific ontologies might be manageble. That is where a lot of work has been done. The problem is moving up the hierarchy of abstraction where the ontology meets encoding of common-sense items. Cyc has tried for years to encode common sense rules and terms in hopes that it would approximate human common sense. But problem I see with that approach is that humans (those entering the rules in the system for example) themselves don't know how common sense is encoded. They just know it, but it is hard to formalize that knowledge and it is very much personalized.