Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontology similarity and accurate communication

[Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx>]

At 12:33 PM -0500 3/14/08, John F. Sowa wrote:

> Dear Matthew,
>
> We seem to have an agreement in principle, but there are many
> details
> to be resolved.  (That, of course, is where the devil is
> lurking.)
>
> MW> We seem to have reached agreement here, provided
> compatibility
>  > is defined as a mapping being available.
>
> Being available or derivable.
>
> As an example, see slides 9 to 16 of the talk I mentioned in an
> earlier note:
>    
> http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/semtech3.pdf
>     The Goal of Language Understanding
>
> That is just one example, and much more work is needed to develop
> the software into a tool that connects smoothly to various
> kinds
> of DBs and KBs.  But it illustrates
> the point that two accurate
> descriptions of the same object or situation should be
> compatible
> and it should be possible to find a
> mapping between them.

With the greatest respect for the work described, it really does not illustrate that point. What it illustrates is that there are important cases where mappings exist between descriptions. But that is a much more modest claim that yours here, which is that if they both describe the same object or situation then there must be a mapping between them: in other words, that truly incompatible descriptions of a single reality are impossible. That is much closer to Pat Cassidy's position, and I don't think its likely to be true. (One might argue that its a better strategy to assume its true and fail, than to assume its false and never try, however :-)

> In that example, both descriptions
> happened to describe exactly
> the same information.  But the mappings may be harder to find
> when each description focuses on different aspects and there is
> only a partial overlap.

Surely in cases like this, one might expect that no mapping should exist. The informations might be completely independent: one might be about the dimensions of an object, another about its history, say.

> I won't claim that it's easy, much more R
> & D is necessary,
> but it should be possible to derive such
> mappings.

How about: its worth trying hard to derive such mappings. I can agree with that.

Pat

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