Re: [ontolog-forum] orthogonal

[Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx>]

At 11:12 AM -0600 3/4/08, Schiffel, Jeffrey A wrote:

> From: Alexander Garcia Castro
       
> Hopefully this is not so out of focus. I am looking for a definition
for orthogonality. When > are ontologies orthogonal? Any body who can
recommend me some good papers about orthogonal > > ontologies? Is there
a measure for orthogonality? 

Alexander,

An ontology is intended to define the terms of a domain,

Careful. In one (widely accepted) sense of 'definition', most ontologies are written in languages which do not support definitions. (Examples: RDF, UML, OWL, Common Logic)

>  and the
> relationships among the terms. This allows for information
> exchange
> among agents, human or machine. It enables semantic
> interchange.

OK, but now things get confused. There are several distinct ideas here:

> If two agents, each using an ontology,
> cannot exchange terms that can be
> fitted into the respecive ontology each is using

? What exactly do you mean by 'fitted into'? OWL, RDF and CL *always* allow for exchange of terms, so this notion of 'fitting' must mean more than simply "adding to".

> , then they must be
> using different, non-overlapping
> ontologies. These two ontologies would
> be orthogonal.

So 'orthogonal' simply means 'different' ? Is that really what you mean to say?

> No term or relation in one ontology would
> have meaning in
> the other.

That is a different idea altogether. In OWL, for example, any term in any ontology can be said to 'have meaning' in any other ontology (that is, assertions involving it can be added to the other ontology and entailments can be drawn from them together.) The same is true for most forms of conventional logical ontology languages.

> The ontologies would be mutually
> exclusive.

In what sense of 'exclusive'? Do you mean they would be mutually inconsistent? Because that is yet a third idea, and the claim seems false.

Pat

> -- Jeffrey Schiffel
>  
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