In Norton Juster’s classic The Phantom Tollbooth, a young boy boy visits the Kingdom of Wisdom and finds that its principal cities, Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, are in a cold war likely to turn quite hot. This conflict makes no sense and is the consequence of the Princesses Rhyme and Reason having been exiled to the Castle in the Air.
Okay, the symbolism is a bit over the top, but the conflict about whether semantics should involve numbers as opposed to some logical formalism makes just as little sense and could also benefit from the return of Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason. There is not just one way to build a house, or plant a garden, or skin a cat. In any real-world enterprise, we always have multiple options, each with tradeoffs.
Our job as an semantic API developer is to provide another option with tradeoffs that are attractive to users. What we offer with statistical semantics is simplicity, transparency, broad coverage, timely data, rigor, and historical grounding of methodology. And we strive to be better each day at what we do.