Re: [ontolog-forum] [Obo-relations] Heterarchy & Hierarchy, oh my my

[Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx>]

At 10:22 AM -0400 5/5/08, Bill Andersen wrote:

> G'morning, Pat.

Hi Bill

.... I'm going to find an ontology where I can say

        (instantiates MadisonSquareGarden JohnSowa)

, with these names conventionally interpreted, pretty damned hard to
make sense of.

Well, OK, but how about

(instantiates British PatHayes) &
(instantiates CitizenshipProperty British) &
(instantiates LegalClassification CitizenshipProperty)

> Well, you swapped the argument order of what I had intended (namely
> (instantiates <thing> <class>)), but ok.

Sorry.

> > This kind of thing is also ruled out by
> > your strict binary exclusivity rule.
> No, it's not.  In your example, British, CitizenshipProperty, and
> LegalClassification would all be what I called 'Type's above, whereas
> PatHayes would not - it would be an Individual.
> > And getting us past this kind of rigidity
> > is one of the chief motivations for OWL 2 replacing OWL
> > 1.
> Sorry, I don't track the OWL world closely enough.  Didn't know
> there was a ...2 in the works.  Do you mean the punning
> capability that OWL 1.1 has?

Yes, and it's now officially OWL 2. No more decimal fractions of OWLs.

> > If you have managed to avoid the need for
> > this, you must have either been looking at very simple ontologies, or
> > have some 'work-around', ie an ugly hack to avoid naive binary
> > exclusion rules.
> >
> >
> > By the way, writing (instantiates A B) instead of (A B) is a good
> > example itself of one of these ugly hacks.
> (A B) is cool with me.  I was just trying to make explicit what
> the predication was doing.
> > > > My recommendation is to apply the
> > > refrigerator principle
> > > > to those two terms.
> > > I'm happy to toss any overly burdened terms so long as the same
> > > work
> > > gets done.
> > And what work is that, in this case?
> That it makes no sense to say (PatHayes ...) where we take 'PatHayes'
> to denote you.

Well, I have to say that I don't have this problem. I can imagine myself to be a property. For example, I might be the property of pieces of space-time that is true when they are wholly occupied by my body (construed as a 4-d entity; or if you prefer, make me a continuant and switch to 3-d and say that the property is time-dependent.)  This might be odd, but it seems quite coherent, and its an alternative way of talking, and if someone wanted to adopt it, I wouldn't say they were wrong, or expect my software to give them an error message.

>  If you can tell me how that makes
> any sense while preserving what we mean when we talk of
> 'Type'

Ive never understood that to mean anything more than "satisfying a type predicate" where being a 'type predicate' is a rather mysterious property of predicates, one that I confess to not really understanding, but Im happy to allow people to use it if they feel that it means something. I have no idea which of the various properties that are true of me count as 'types' and which don't. (In case the first on your list is 'being a member of the species homo sapiens', read "On the poverty of the Linnaean hierarchy" by Marc Ereshefsky, which will completely destroy your confidence in any of these Latinate binary classifications.)

> , I'm all ears.  All else you
> said
>
> (British PatHayes)
> (CitizenshipProperty British)
> (LegalClassification CitizenshipProperty)
> is just fine (not just fine, but great)
> with me.  Nothing I said in my original post implied that it was
> not.

Hmm, OK.  Types can themselves have types? Without that making them into individuals? So you aren't advocating GOFOL-style strictness about arguments? That isn't obvious from what you said (though I admit it is consistent with what you said... :-)

Pat

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