“What is the what?” – Or, knowing jack about jack.

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Leona

You should probably know what words I’ve hijacked in order to complete this blog post. By hijack, I mean these are my definitions; they are local to this blog post… they last until the end of the post, at which point they vanish into thin air.

An ontology is the specification that makes a reality perceivable.

Auto-learning is my mildly-silly name for the process of teaching yourself something you know absolutely nothing about, with significant constraints (usu. one of time, money, or access to formal education), requiring you to bootstrap an ontology for yourself.

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Test case repositories : taxonomies vs tags

Posted on March 12, 2008 by Leona

Perhaps I’m still high on Clay Shirky’s thoughts about ontologies and how they’re largely outdated, cos I recently created a bunch of test cases and found that the neat (and traditional) categorizations of test levels and test types just wasn’t going to cut it for the application in question.

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Ontologies: the web vs traditional archives.

Posted on March 8, 2008 by Leona

I came across this very interesting article talking about how ontologies are largely useless for the web – a place where ‘folksonomies‘ will rule, while ontologies will die a well-deserved death.

I love Shirky’s article and it is very insightful, but he himself hints at one reason why we can’t pooh-pooh old-school classification systems quite so readily: published journals still hold a wealth of quality information, and the unwashed masses are not going to get their mitts on the good stuff – not if the publishing world can help it.

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