06 April 2006

Analysis and ontology

i'd like to elevate
the humble html tag
<ul>
(unordered list)
to a post of honor
in the philosophical realm

where i'll re-dub it
'analysis'
after a rule of thumb
that emerged as i compiled
my timeline of knowledge representation

where i found that
any domain of knowledge
could be advanced
by proposing an
unordered list
of components of that domain

ie, an analysis

which lists i tried to quote
as illustrations
for the timeline




so a hierarchy is built of
nested
analyses

and an ontology is a hierarchy
that tries to span a domain

but all universal ontologies
are failures
because complex composites
can't follow
a simple hierarchical analysis