Alongside the review in the dead tree edition of NYRB is an advert from John Hopkins University Press, headed Resisting Categorization. A timely reminder that semantics are as much contested as agreed, and that rather than communities creating ontologies a la semantic web, ontologies create communities:
In recent years, drug companies have perfected a new and highly effective method to expand their markets. Instead of promoting drugs to treat diseases, they have begun to promote diseases to fit their drugs...to promote new or exaggerated conditions, companies give them serious sounding names along with abbreviations. Thus, heartburn is now "Gastro-eosophageal reflux disease" or GERD.
The world of classification might say Heartburn SEE GERD, or draw up some fancy RDF statement. But in doing so creates too simple a model of the real world, especially a real world that is rapidly making its knowledge fully digital.
Even outside drug company politics, medical classification is contested. For example, coding of the treatment of COPD is bound up with contested visions of the organisation of the NHS. The following quote reflects layers of complex disagreement and negotiation:
The Government appears to be committed to the pursuit of a market economy approach and the evolution of Payment by Results (PbR) has necessitated the production of many more codes to provide greater definition of our activity. We have been successful in bids for several new codes but there is still some way to go before we iron out some of the residual bids and any frustrations associated with the lack of definition of some of our more specialised activity.
Evidence of the instability and contested nature of semantics is ready to hand, but of necessity overlooked by classificationists for whom the possibility of stable agreed ontologies is part of their ontology.
Related Post:
Widget by [ Iptek-4u ]
