MW: No. It was you that introduced the word "scientific".
MW: How would you distiguish his use of the word "theory" from the meaning that you would ascribe to it in a computing sense?
MW: In what way is it different? In what sense is the set of things that a system will let you hold information about not its ontology? If it is not its ontology, what is it?
MW: Perhaps, but it might also be skill in the knowledge extraction process that enables the "fruitfulness" that Chris refers to.
MW: After your response to Pat C advising him to favour an ontology of time that did not make a commitment to a continuous or granular view of time, exactly the kind of fruitfuness in design Chris and I are advocating, I am surprised that you would say that. Fruitfulness in design, for me, has a lot to do with not closing off possibilities unnecessarily. This is not so much a matter of forseeing future requirements, as designing, in a way that allows what is possible.
MW: Yes, I think you are at cross purposes. I suspect that one of the problems here is that you would take what I would call fruitful design as obvious, but it is not so frequently practised. A good test of fruitful design is that it does not make any statements that are not true under all circumstances (in any context to bring together two threads). It is precisly this that makes a piece of ontology portable, reusable, and hence fruitful.
MW: I think you are getting too hung up on this unforseen thing. It is not the main point, reusability, flexibility, and extensibility are the results of fruitfulness, whether or not you can forsee all the consequences that this might bring. The kind of behaviours that lead to this are not placing constraints at a higher level in the ontology than they truly reside, just because other parts of a larger ontology are not part of the requirements this time - one of John Sowa's hobby horses, and another way of saying what I said above, about making statements that are true in all circumstances.