The world tends to be much more contextual and fuzzy than the crisp categories used in logic or ontology.
Ontologies only work well in relatively restricted formal domains, such as names, addresses and telephone numbers. It already becomes much more difficult to create an ontology of professions, since new types of occupations are constantly emerging while old ones shift, merge or disappear. But if you stick to the formal domains, the semantic web approach does do not much more than a traditional database does, and therefore the added intelligence is limited.
I see the solution in some kind of a hybrid formal/contextual labelling of phenomena, where categories are to some degree fuzzy and able to adapt to changing contexts. An example of such a hybrid approach are user-added “tags”, where the same item may get many different tags that are partly similar, partly overlapping, partly independent, and where tags get a weight simply by counting the number of people who have used a particular tag. But reasoning on tag clouds will demand a more flexible form of inference than the one used in semantic networks, and more discipline from the users to come up with truly informative tags…*
Francis Heylighen on the Emerging Global Brain
March 16, 2011
Re Animism, which Heylighen mentions in the article, the assumption of a collective consciousness in all (perhaps an appearance of that to the situated individual due to collective affect of what may appear individually 'random' movements (and motivations?)) appears to be dismissed but it could have been "built out"ideologically and physically via our constructions, such an understanding of animals, nature etc as one global consciousness maybe was related to a synchronistic form of symbolic / semiotics we are dismissing, perhaps it is from the synthesis of these two views that the progress will come...
Also GTD :Affordance, effieciency etc
* Could be implemented explored via
http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/book/ch05.html
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