Having a wonderful time at the 2nd Ontogenesis meeting. I’ve just escaped from teaching for the year, and have managed to fill my diary for the next two weeks with research.

There’s been a large amount of discussion about ontology building. The practical upshot of this is that the two most important tools are the phone and the plane. It’s all about talking to people.

We need more and better tools for allowing collaboration on ontologies; we need easy to use interfaces which encourage people to make small contributions, while remaining formality. We need to make better use of the internet — skype has turned out to be a boon, but it’s telecon capabilities are poor. Best of all, we need to be able to put our feet up, share a coffee, beer and scrap paper without being in one place.

I think my proudest moment was when I spent 5 minutes managing to make the point that sometimes people take a long time to actually say anything.

Originally published on my old blog site.