Captain's Log: My (new) niche in the World

Captain's Log, Lincoln's Birthday: After being absorbed in my new pastime these past several months trying to learn enough Philosophy to know whether it is worth learning at all to be of any practical use in my Software Engineering career, I have decided a decidedly *yes*. Not only is it worth continuing to pursue, it could well be my next career: Exploring and writing about the intersection between Philosophy and Computer Science. i.e. "Experimental Philosophy" or "Empirical Philosophy" or some such.
I can already see that Philosophy is a deep ocean to get drowned in; better to take on the much smaller pond that is cross-disciplinary studies. Nobody in mainstream computer programming is aware of this stuff! I know because I have a computer science degree and have been doing hands on development for 30+ years from the days of spaghetti code thru structured programming thru modular programing thru embedded programming thru object oriented programming thru distributed programming thru AJAX. I think I saw one article about Plato in CACM once. There is a book in this; dare I say a series? At the very least I ought to start a blog to put these notebook entries someplace in the meantime.

POSTSCRIPT - Aug 26th, 2007
Having made the decision to focus on practical programming tips based on basic ideas from Philosophy (as opposed to diving into the deep end of pure philosophy), I ironically find that "Pragmatism" is specifically American and so my pragmatic approach is apparently a foregone conclusion given my American birthright.

Identifying Ontologies with URIs

As noted before in my original ephiphanies #10 & #15 and Level III Existential Programming, there should be a whole collection of meta-data around each "fact" documenting the source of that data, the time that data was acquired, etc, etc. This meta-data in effect constitutes an ontology definition; one per each different source/timestamp/etc. To be sure, these various ontologies are largely similar to each other and could benefit from an inheritance tree (ala OO class hierarchies).

In Java, such collections of definitions can be grouped into Packages. In XML, they can be grouped into Namespaces. So, a pragmatic way to factor out this metadata (such that it is not copied into every "fact"), is to give the ontology a name and tag each fact with that name (in the same way as each Java value is "tagged" with a data type that includes the Package name/path). And since, XML has already defined URIs as the format for namespace identifiers, and it is easy to map Package names with URIs, Existential Programming systems/languages could use URIs to identify the ontology associated with some set of facts. Since Existential Programming systems seek to seamlessly convert between an O/O and an E/R and an S/N representation, having OO packages easily mappable to data exchange mechanisms like XML is a good thing.

POSTSCRIPT - Nov 23rd, 2007
It is hard to tell which of my epiphanies are new and which are things I read long ago but later remembered as if they were a new idea...I'm sure I read this URI stuff in the Semantic Web articles (see Principle #1), but only "remembered" it when stumbling back across it today. At any rate, it was only recently that Tim Berners-Lee wrote this post about Linked Data using URIs.