>Pat,
>
> This
> > seems to me to illustrate a wise observation by Doug Lenat: you might
> > have to have an upper ontology, but which one you have doesn't really
> > matter a damn, because there's very little useful to say at the upper
> > levels, and whatever you really want to say at the middle levels,
> > where all the actual content is, can be made to fit with just about
> > any upper level you like.
>
>This is oft quoted, but I think has more to do with marketing than
>science. In fact, we showed in 1999 on the HPKB project that about 1/3
>of the terms in proofs and answers on a large test were from the Cyc
>upper ontology. (01)
Yes, but I wonder what this means exactly. You
used metrics based simply on a term occurring in
the answer or proof. If an ontology makes an
upper-level distinction between, say, entities
and qualities (I'm making this up) and then uses
its own terminology of 'entity' and 'quality' in
its middle-level axioms, then these terms will of
course occur in many proofs. This however does
not establish that there is any actual need for
this distinction: the occurrences in the proofs
may arise simply from the middle levels of the
ontology being carefully constructed to maintain
the distinctions it itself insists upon making in
its upper levels. (02)
BTW, this is a very valuable study and I don't
mean to denigrate it. And I entirely concur with
your conclusions there about the need for more of
this kind of work to be done. (03)
> I would agree that several reasonable upper ontologies
>could be constructed, at least three have, and possibly any given middle
>level content could be reformulated to use a different upper level, but
>that doesn't mean that the upper content isn't immediately useful in any
>practical inference. Try doing without saying that one event happens
>before another, for example. That's upper level content (04)
Then we are at cross purposes. I'd call that
middle level; in fact, its part of a temporal
ontology describing relations between
time-intervals. Yes, that is about real things
(events) and says something nontrivial about
them. But go up from 'event'. If something tells
you that events are occurrents, what use is that?
A good rule of thumb is, if the terminology being
used to make the distinctions is arcane or
obscure, then the distinction is likely to be
worth making only for formal reasons, to satisfy
a philosophical prejudice or in order to provide
a scaffolding for a more useful distinction. In
most large-scale ontologies, the top three or
four levels of the classification seem to have
this quality. (05)
Pat (06)
>bound to be
>present in any number of practical inferences.
>
>Cohen, P., Chaudhri, V., Pease A., and Schrag, R. (1999), Does Prior
>Knowledge Facilitate the Development of Knowledge Based Systems, In
>Proceedings of the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial
>Intelligence (AAAI-1999). Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI Press.
>http://home.earthlink.net/~adampease/professional/cohen-aaai99.ps
>
>Adam
>
>Pat Hayes wrote:
>>> Weighing in with Ingvar...
>>>
>>> If I want to describe an organization*, is it the people, the facilities
>>> or the notion of an entity that performs some function in accordance
>>> with internal guidance* and external laws*? The ideas in the guidance
>>> and laws may be reduced to energy on phosphor or symbols in ink on paper
>>> but it's the ideas that matter. How do I describe the idea of a design*
>>> produced by the organization* that satisfies a customers mission
>>> statement* as they compete in a economic marketspace* to reach their
>>> annual goals*
>>>
>>> * = subclass of Concept
>>
>> Well now, I understand all of the above until that last claim. This
>> seems to me to illustrate a wise observation by Doug Lenat: you might
>> have to have an upper ontology, but which one you have doesn't really
>> matter a damn, because there's very little useful to say at the upper
>> levels, and whatever you really want to say at the middle levels,
> > where all the actual content is, can be made to fit with just about
>> any upper level you like. I know a fair amount about organizations,
>> designs, mission statements and annual goals, and enough about
>> economic marketplaces and internal guidance to follow what others are
>> saying, but I'm damned if I know anything worth writing down about
>> Concepts. And indeed, if I were asked to come up with a name for a
>> superclass of all those *'s, my reaction would be that they have
>> nothing whatever in common. I fail to see how an organization can
>> possibly be said to be a concept, in fact, or for that matter a
>> mission statement (I have actually held mission statements in my
>> hands at various times). Of course we can speak of a concept of an
>> organization, but that's not the same as the organization itself. Can
>> a concept have legal rights? Some organizations do.
>>
>> Pat Hayes
>
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