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Note to several forums, from Prueitt

There are points of agreements between all of us. The problem comes when we attempt to understand if there is something not yet perfect about our information science and its technical form, information technology. This "problem" of self-introspection is almost as difficult as an examination of "democracy" as current practiced in the US. It is religious and political in scope.

The advance over SQL databases made by XML is XML's openness to new fields. Unfortunately this becomes for the RDF folks the "Open World Assumption", when used with a particular type of logic. This open world assumption is not all that one needs to model the emergence of new categories in nature, in social discourse for example. It is nice for agility but it is not the final perfect step in information science.

Type hierarchy is also a positive step that is not everything that it is set out to be. And yet, the assumptions of OWL technology are held as if religious beliefs. Confusion develops because issues are not separated, resulting in the RDF layer cake architecture rather than a pure implementation of something like Fielding's representational state transfer (REST) with Interfaces having a C2 type form (ie a kind of "complex" object where information flows up and down a stack and connectors can act like information buses) . (I will not elaborate further about this confusion here.)

The clarifying issue here is that our (human) understanding of natural phenomenon does not fit into class - subclass hierarchy perfectly. Both our understanding and nature is at fault. Description of some aspects of nature fit into class - subclass hierarchy (like biological taxonomy) but a large part of natural phenomenon does not.

Unless there is some way to change how information technology is created, ie primarily motivated by narrow business interests, we (as a culture) may forever move from one "simple concept" to another without understanding the nature of those real processes that create the social fabric.

Almost all of current American social dysfunction is now coupled to a failed information science. Without a revision and correction of this discipline, we are simply powerless to understand the consequences of actions such as the making of social disagreement a cause for world wide war, or of leaving our society open to natural disaster.

I do not feel that my "wisdom" here will be universally understood. I am not sure that I have wisdom, almost nothing about my life suggests that I do.

I feel very alone in taking a position that the genesis of information technology has a problem. The BCNGroup's National Project to establish the "knowledge sciences" has been proposed so that some focus might be made on bringing the entire discipline into a correction, based on a conjecture that computation itself is were the limitations have non-removable origin. Computation in turn is to be seen as having a static nature due to the difference between the induction of information structure, as an abstraction, and the deductive machinery all computer programs are defined with.

Relational databases are wonderful things that should be understood and used by everyone in everyday life; but that is not the case for two basic reasons; educational foundations are not in our school systems and the de facto ownership of the technology by vendors.

XML is wonderful and much can be done with it in for example service oriented architecture, as Thomas Erl's books shows very clearly. We, my group, is working with XLM without ontology in attempting to bring an information system to all K-12 and Higher Education administrative systems. In education the relational database model, as figured out one by one, makes uniformity between all systems impossible (for reasons that are difficult to talk about). XML opens this interoperability up.

But XML without "semantics" gives to little structure of data, and thus we naturally come to the need for "schema". Relational schema (data base design) serves many purposes but has non-removable problems with interoperability (because of differences in meaning and community viewpoints about how information needs to be structured.) So we are lead to the use of some type of ontology (ie a set of formally specified concepts).