Change Management for Distributed Ontologies

Preface A writer keeps surprising himself... he doesn't know what he is saying until he sees it on the page. It is often said that the preface is the most read part of a thesis. If this is true, what is the contribution of distributing a thesis to the progress of science? Why does NWO 1 pay for printing it? Let us first try to answer the question why the preface is thought to the most read part of a thesis. A possible answer is that the preface is the only part of thesis that is understandable for outsiders. If we assume that a preface normally doesn't describe the scientific contribution, this would be a bad sign for scientists about their ability to explain their achievements. However, I doubt whether this is the genuine reason. In this thesis, for example, the summary (page 181) is probably easier to understand than the preface with its numerous references to people that many the readers will not know. My hypothesis is that the preface is among the most read parts of a thesis because it gives a glimpse of the real process behind the nicely shaped-up story in the book. It hints about the moments of disappointment and desperateness, the time lost in mastering LaTeX, the writer-blocks, the procrastinating, the " essential " philosophical discussions with colleagues, and the oh-so-nice but not very relevant programming tasks. In the end, a preface shows that doing research is not the well-structured process that it seems to be, but that it is as humble as all other activities. It may very well be that this message is the essence of what scientists have to say to the world... Therefore, for the sake of science, continue reading the preface and don't feel obliged to read further. The research described in this thesis has been performed within the KIRMIT project. This thesis is probably not the outcome that the people who wrote the proposal for the KIRMIT project had in mind. When the project started, we expected to work with two PhD students on multimedia indexing and retrieval, but because of various reasons things went different. I would like to thank Bob Wielinga, Bert Bredeweg and Hans Akkermans for the freedom and the time they gave me to find my own way. Hans has been very inspiring during the whole process, with his clear ideas about research methodologies …