by Michael Uschold | Mar 14, 2025 | The Whiteboard
gist: Buckets, Buckets Everywhere: Who Knows What to Think We humans are categorizing machines, which is to say, we like to create metaphorical buckets and put things inside. But there are different kinds of buckets, and different ways to model them...
by Michael Uschold | Jan 16, 2020 | The Whiteboard
Google ontologist, Denny Vrandečić started a vigorous thread on the question of what constitutes a decade. See for example, the article: “People Can’t Even Agree On When The Decade Ends”. This, is a re-emergence of the question from 20 years ago on whether the new...
by Michael Uschold | Jul 12, 2017 | The Whiteboard
Paving Cow Paths Numerous modern day streets in downtown Boston defy logic – until you realize that the city fathers literally paved over the transit system created and used by cows.* This gave the immediate benefit of getting places faster, while losing out on...
by Michael Uschold | Feb 10, 2017 | The Whiteboard
This blog follows from a recent blog by Dan Carey called Screwdrivers and Properties. It points to a longer whitepaper on the topic of avoiding property proliferation. One way we keep the number of primitives small is to avoid creating a subproperty if its meaning is...
by Michael Uschold | Jan 26, 2017 | Semantics and Ontology
Sometimes when we’re designing ontologies we’re faced with design choices that would lead us to create what we call “binary instances” or a situation where it will take the instantiation of two instances (often of different classes) in order to capture one concept. ...
