Re: <nettime> Critique of the "Semantic Web"

[Marianne van den Boomen <boom@xs4all.nl>]

Florian Cramer wrote:

> My point actually was not that there would be a danger in the Semantic
> Web to confuse the two Nettimes (since avoiding such ambiguities as
> opposed conventional full text queries is its very design objective),
> but quite the opposite: That with its goal of unambiguous
> categorization, it reduces, or even fails to acknowledge, the cultural
> complexity of the phenomena it references. 

Even after reading Reto's precise counter arguments and explanations I 
still agree with Florian's evaluation of the Semantic Web project. What 
I actually don't see is why Florian insists that the notion of ontology 
as used in the domain of the semantic web  is so different from the use 
in philosophy. From Aristotle on the branch of ontology has implied the 
same epistemological pitfalls as web ontologies, namely what Florian 
calls cosmology and what Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence. I 
would say it is no coincidence that the same term ontology pops up 
whenever humans or machines try to capture entities, properties and 
attributions in a more or less coherent meta system of categories.
Florian, can you elaborate on this issue?
Thanks!

Marianne


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