This actually seems more like ontology work than epistemology work. In one of my academic fields (I do software, education, and the learning sciences), we tend to use the term "epistemology" to be knowledge about knowledge itself. Generally questions like "where does the ontology of pizza come from?", or "who has claim on saying what is and is not a pizza, and where do they derive that claim?" are epistemological ones, and mapping out the state of different claims are ontological ones.
Is 'epistemology', as used here to mean more of a meta-ontology a common word usement that's being structured these days? Is it something from clojure or one of the other lisp-y spaces people are building ontologies? I played with building ontologies about epistemology (specifically, nature of science, quality of scientific claim, etc) using KQML back in the Dark Ages of 2000 or so, but haven't really looked at the work since then.
The article in question uses OWL -- which is a subset of first order logic -- to illustrate the point. Clojure is (in this article) just a syntactic wrapping.
A pizza is only made in pizzeria, is baked directly into the wood stove, over the marble
A focaccia is only made in panificio, is baked into a baking tray
Btw a focaccia barese is a total specific thing (always with oil, olive, and tomato pieces) it was a shock to know this thing does not exist outiside my city
Carbonara is another highly debated dish - here in Roma (where it is was supposedly born ~50 years ago) some people insist you only need egg, where as others insist you need egg and cheese (and then there is the debate over what cheese). I've heard some restaurants stopped serving the dish to prevent heated arguments with their customers.
Even the word for bags in a supermarket can't be agreed on. Here we use "buste", where as in the north they use "sacchetto". Our word there means envelope, so obviously you will get a funny look if you ask for three envelopes when paying for your groceries (the joke is on us though, we use that word for envelope too :P).
Further reading:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2016/02/origins-history-of-roman-...
Ha, that reminds me of sac in the north of France versus poche (the word northerners would use for the thing in their trousers) as used in the south(-west?) to designate a plastic bag in a supermarket...
FWIW, "pizza bianca" is also underspecified, as in many parts of center italy, it might refer to pizza baked from bread makers using the same dough ad the bread rather than pizza dough, just flattened.
This article is light-hearted of course. But there are food ontologies for real -- the BBC have one for organising their recipes. And there is another which is used for food crops, which is used for research into disease (of the crops), and helping to alleviate hunger.
The solution is to allow every agent to either support or disapprove of every semantic statement. This way, the same query will output different realities depending on the agent's opinions, preferences, and network of trust.
Imagine a knowledge base where Jesus statistically both exists and doesn't exists, depending on who wants to know. A knowledge base where some food item is both a pizza and not a pizza. There's no way around it, and this will become the start of a new semantic marketplace.
It's hard to do, ontologically, but you can. It tends to make your ontology very complex though, and at the same time incapable (because it's hard to detect contradictions). So you should only do it when you need to.
It is completely wrong! Pizza and focaccia have a completely different mixture.
Sour dough pizza is pretty nice. Not sure it's allowed according to the book though...
I miss Pizza Hut stuffed-crust pepperoni (with pretzel crust flavor)!!!!
- April Ludgate
