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Re: [ontolog-forum] Re: Unambiguous context information

To: nicolas.rouquette@xxxxxxxxxxxx, ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Internet Business Logic <ibl@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 26 May 2005 07:46:16 -0400
Message-id: <4295B708.5090107@xxxxxxxx>
Hi Nicolas --

You wrote... TopQuadrant's "representational shift" approach

Did you mean Reengineering's representational shift approach?  (Executable open vocabulary English -- see yesterday's note below).

Note that if contextual knowledge is expressed in executable English, then the IP is not locked up in a proprietary tool.  It may then be better executed by an engine with technical support than the experience you described in your recent posting about three versions of OWL, but there would always be a choice of open source or other engines.

The paper http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/paper/19 may be of interest in this connection.

                                                  Cheers,   -- Adrian

-- 

Internet Business Logic  --  online at www.reengineeringllc.com

Reengineering LLC,  PO Box 1412,  Bristol,  CT 06011-1412,  USA

Phone 860 583 9677     Mobile 860 830 2085     Fax 860 314 1029


Nicolas F Rouquette wrote:
Please be aware that I don't speak in any way for NASA, JPL or the California Institute of Technology.

The formal ontology approach is very appealing to me for several reasons.

1) it is a "relative" formalization of 'context', 'description', ....

Duane raised questions about what variables and other considerations are part of 'context'.
This is important because we also need to reason about what is explicitly known to
be irrelevant as much as reason about what is explicitly known to be relevant.
When it's grey, then we're subject to discrepencies of interepretation (you mean X & I mean Y)
because some aspects of the context are subjectively defined.

2) there is already a lot of solid work that has been done to "formalize" these notions

- DOLCE is one example.

- NIST's Process Specification Language is another example, albeit more limited in scope

- There's another "Bob Smith" ;-)   who has a lot of interesting things to say on the matter as well:  http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/

-  There are some commercial efforts as well
(e.g., TopQuadrant's "representational shift" approach)

3) At the end of the day, what matters is to have an explicit definition of what "context" is
that is independently verifiable by a third-party. To verify context claims, we need a simple
way to reach an agreement on the semantic meaning of a context definition. This is sometimes
more difficult to achieve with commercial systems that might rely on proprietary systems &
whose semantics might change. Commercial enterprises have a role to play but I don't believe
we have yet established a synergetic symbiosis of academic research, open-source practices
critical for standarization / reference implementations and proprietary systems that add
a non-functional value-added to the whole picture (if there's functional distortion, then
we're back to square one w.r..t. having to validate proprietary systems or having our
IP locked in a proprietary tool)

4) Although formal ontology offers the intellectual "high-road" approach to 'context' , 'situation', 'process', etc...
there is, in practice, a significant gap between how much of this can actually be achieved with the current
state of the affairs w.r.t. tools, standards, validation suites, etc.. We don't even "apply" the notions of
context, description, etc... to talk about our own semantic web technology, processes, etc...


-- Nicolas.

Bob Smith wrote:

And a good trick is being able to formulate questions that raise "even
better" questions that expose more context for those acting on "answers"...
;-}

B

C. West Churchman's Inquiring Systems, and Mason-Mitroff's popularization of
this technique was fun for a while.

-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Duane Nickull
Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2005 10:06 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Re: Unambiguous context information

I only have questions - not answers  ;-)

This is an interesting topic.  My observation has been that most humans are deceived by their own perception of reality.  I heard a noise, therefore there was a noise.  I live in a temporally-sequentially perceived three dimensional state therefore everyone else perceived things the same way.

I am extremely interested in Nicolas's views on this since NASA obviously has to acknowledge the fact that there are other models for existence.

D

Bob Smith wrote:

 

Hi,

If you allow me to add a pragmatic question....about your point of truth
tables:

You said:


  
There are a number of contextual variables that seem to have the ability
     
        
to contort truth tables.



  
Terrestrial proximity (how close is the thing to a terrestrial body)
     
        
Temporal Temperature Existential State (example: solid, gaseous, liquid)
Granularity of perception precision (to a human in an airplane, the lines
  
in
 

the desserts are pictures, to an ant climbing them, they are simply mounds
of dirt) Number of planes of perception (3d, 4d, *) Energy (humans perceive
such a small band of the overall spectrum.  even something like magnetic
energy can twist apparent "truths")

========================================
So when decision makers have decision tables and truth tables and some
Robert's Rules of Order for debate on consequences, how might resource
policy be developed?

My context is the effort of RAND in the early 1970's to model Presidential
warfare decision making contexts (Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision,
Little Brown, 1971; and subsequent context models including Rational,
Political, Bureaucratic, and "chaos theory".)

Cheers,

Bob 
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Duane Nickull
Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2005 9:29 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Re: Unambiguous context information

Nicholas:

Many thanks for taking the time to parse my initial thoughts.  The paper only touches the surface of where this thinking may go.  I will read the Dolce next to understand more.  Here are some additional thoughts to
  
ponder:
 

Where does one draw the line between something being a universal truth and a perception/assertion?  If I smash two rocks together, it makes a sound.  Sure - on earth if there is a gaseous environment to transmit the shock waves.  What if it happens very slowly by two rocks being forced together as part of continental shift?  It still makes a sound, yet it would likely be imperceivable to humans due to the long distance between frequency peaks.

A rock is matter.  In the context of human perception, it appears solid, yet it is not.  If we examined it under close enough scrutiny, it is a matrix of related bits of energy.
<quote who="me">
Are humans' axioms of 'universal truths' tainted by our own arrogance in assuming our perceptions are ubiquitous?
</quote>

A rock has mass.  How can you measure the mass.  In the context of static terrestrial existence, it is easy to assign a value based on relating the gravitational pull to some scale.  In space, the measure of mass is completely relative to the velocity contrast to the perceiver.

There are a number of contextual variables that seem to have the ability to contort truth tables.

Terrestrial proximity (how close is the thing to a terrestrial body)
Temporal
Temperature
Existential State (example: solid, gaseous, liquid)
Granularity of perception precision (to a human in an airplane, the lines in the desserts are pictures, to an ant climbing them, they are simply mounds of dirt)
Number of planes of perception (3d, 4d, *)
Energy (humans perceive such a small band of the overall spectrum.  even something like magnetic energy can twist apparent "truths")

There are probably many more human being related contexts too.

I am definitely going to read the Dolce work you referenced. Sounds very interesting.

Duane

Internet Business Logic wrote:



  
Nicholas --

You wrote:

/If you really want unambiguous context information, it ought be spelled out in a way that is sufficiently formal and sound to make reasoning valuable and useful. /

I'd suggest that a _representation shift_ can help with this.
As you may know, we have been suggesting that reasoning directly with open vocabulary English can help to solve these kinds of problems.  Why describe the problem and its solution in English, then try to solve it in a non-English notation?  That's the source of most of the problems.

Although reasoning directly with open vocabulary English may sound like blue sky, there is a system that does this, albeit with a subtle trade off to avoid dictionary construction yet get precise English semantics.  (The underlying logical semantics is model-theoretic.)

The system is live, online, with a number of Ontology and other examples, at the site below.  The author- and user interface is simply a browser. The approach is described in the e-Government presentation.  There's also a recent paper at http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/paper/19 .

Thanks in advance for comments.

                                                   -- Adrian

-- 

Internet Business Logic  --  online at www.reengineeringllc.com

Reengineering LLC,  PO Box 1412,  Bristol,  CT 06011-1412,  USA

Phone 860 583 9677     Mobile 860 830 2085     Fax 860 314 1029




 
    
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-- 

Internet Business Logic  --  online at www.reengineeringllc.com

Reengineering LLC,  PO Box 1412,  Bristol,  CT 06011-1412,  USA

Phone 860 583 9677     Mobile 860 830 2085     Fax 860 314 1029


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