Paola
The question was about what are the expectations of
the terms in an ontology. The Semantic Web version seems to suggest that you
just pick up on the terms that you are interested in, and that's enough.
However, if the term is just the start of a chain of inference, then someone
reading only the term will mis-understand the term, at least to some extent.
In principle, to understand the term in the way that it is meant, one should
follow the inferences which the sender has made, and probably with the same
inference engine - hence the need for omniscience.
Alternatively, one might hypothesise that individuals
may only pick up on the knowledge they need - use only the terms without
further inference. That means that they have, to some extent, misunderstood
the term. This raises two questions; firstly, how can one quantify the level
of misunderstanding? and secondly, how can one then determine if the level of
misunderstanding is significant?
Behind this is my suspicion is
that many people start with the assumtion that, say, nouns name things or
concepts. An alternative is that nouns are a grammatical category that allow
people to play particular word games. Many - but not all - of these games
are games that relate to named things or concepts. One problem for ontology
development is to exclude from an ontology the nouns which do not name
things (are games only) - all though they may have a function in
meta-ontology conversations. For example, I would classify "property" as
defining one such game. We can cite as properties of a ball its shape, colour,
age or cost without suggesting that there is anything in common between shape,
colour age or cost (other than being a property). Conversely, the game
property rules out "being owned by" or "having followed a particular course"
as properties.
Further, I suspect most terms
in an upper ontology to be word games, that is, that these terms are
contexts in which a particular set of metaphysical rules may be applied,
where:
Context - an agreement on the things germane to a
conversation
Metaphysical rule - a criterion for
distinguishing categories within a context - e.g. change is germane to
physical objects but not to abstract things like numbers.
(At least Ambrose Bierce might
agree).
Sean Barker
Bristol, UK
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Sean
I am curious what is the preamble for this, or are
you just following your train of thoughts?
I have been working on
some aspects of distributed knowledge, in particular in relation to my
interest in 'expertfinding ', and I am interested in what you say but
of all things , its your conclusion that strikes a chord with me
One
might also observe that to base everything on a single,
comprehensive
ontology, one would need to be
omniscient.
Not necessarily. A single unified ontology can be a model for
omniscience, but individuals (people and machines) only access parts of it
at any given time, until and unless , our cognitive apparatus (the way we
learn and make inferences) is radically overhauled.
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