Shadowcat Systems Limited  sufficiently advanced technology
Telephone 01524 842155 Email: info(at)  Thu Jun 28 01:35:00 2012
Awful Puns (part 1)  We all know the traditional line  Premature
Optimisation Is The Root Of All Evil.  It also has a slightly
more tongue in cheek mate:  Premature Generalisation Is The Root
Of All Eval.  Today, however, I want to talk about premature
genderisation. There's bonus puns at the end if you make it all
the way through.  Principles of Ontological Thought  To quote
the wikipedia article on philosphical ontology:   To quote the
wikipedia article on ontologies in information science:   And,
to my mind more interestingly:  In theory, an ontology is a
"formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation".
An ontology renders shared vocabulary and taxonomy which models
a domain with the definition of objects and/or concepts and
their properties and relations.  And here, ladies and
gentlecats, is where we run into a problem. Because we have this
nasty, annoying, often re