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Re: [ontolog-forum] Looking forward at the past

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Mike Bennett <mbennett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:59:03 +0000
Message-id: <491481E7.8040803@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Hi Ronald,    (01)

Apologies for the long delay, I have had this reply lined up for a while 
but I'm still learning what I don't know so I needed to give it some 
more thought.    (02)

Thanks for the frank reply, it certainly helped to put a few things in 
perspective. When I read James' paper I didn't get anything of the sense 
of affordances which some later perusal (and the messages in this 
thread) gave to it. I also understand now why James' thesis is still 
listed as "unpublished PdD Thesis" which has made it difficult to 
reference.    (03)

I first came across his work when I was working on the TWIST technical 
standard for treasury messages, as some folks at the LSE were involved 
with that. I had been looking for some means to capture the meanings 
that were intended to be conveyed in the messages, which were simple XML 
schema based messages. One of the problems that intrigued me in the 
financial world was the difference between meaning that was "about" 
something, such as market data and reference data, versus meaning in the 
sort of messages used in foreign exchange trading or securities trading, 
where one party makes a legal commitment to another party. These 
bilateral messages are conveyed over the wire just like market data 
messages, but the meaning of something like for example price would be 
very different in the two instances. Referential meaning I could see 
could be readily conveyed in any format that could represent a semantic 
network of terms and relationships. The NORMA work on the other hand 
looked like something that could deal with meanings in the transactional 
context. Hence my wanting to find a way to relate NORMA to other bodies 
of work, and my distress at finding no such references in Backhouse's work.    (04)

Here is how I see things, please feel free to knock it down.    (05)

It seems to me that terms "about" stuff and terms defining the 
affordances at (by?) an individual or organisation, are two separate and 
perhaps orthogonal things. If we look at human beings as an example, the 
things we experience and the commitments we make are unique to 
ourselves, and are modelled in a form in our minds which is not really 
scrutable by any means. When we use language to communicate about these 
affordances, we create referential terms, represented in the format 
defined for that language. So in the financial world we have terms which 
are a record of some transaction or some legal commitment to pay some 
future cash flow. This can  be represented in an ontology, if you have 
terms that represent second-order roles and relationships as well as 
first order entities. This is very different to how the affordances 
concept has been described, which as I understand it is more 
existential, or at any rate more directly related to the individual. So 
that is closer to the internal representations of facts as they relate 
to the individual, rather than a publicly shared set of data about those 
facts.    (06)

If you add to the ontology the ability to represent perspective, then it 
may be possible to represent affordances in more detail. This is a real 
requirement for over the counter securities trading (the ones that all 
the trouble has been about, not surprisingly since no-one has a good 
model for their meanings). Unlike traded financial instruments (stocks, 
debt securities etc.), an over the counter instrument is a contract 
between two individuals. Reporting on this in the marketplace, valuing 
these instruments and assessing any risk that they represent is 
therefore nearly impossible in the absence of meaningful referential terms.    (07)

Where I think maybe there is some scope for relating the two approaches 
is with legal norms. As I see it, one of the primary "sensory" inputs to 
the semantics of an organisation is legal semantics. So it should be 
possible to ground the meanings of a lot of terms within an 
organisation, in legal terms. For example a stock is a kind of legal 
contract, as are those over the counter swaps, though the parties are 
very different.    (08)

In the EDM Council model, I have simply defined a contract as a high 
level kind of "Independent Thing", aling with Law, Jurisdiction etc. 
Contract has relationships (object properties) to jurisdictions, 
countries, legal entities and so on. I have also defined a class of 
second order "Perspectival Thing", which covers for example the 
viewpoint from which credit and debt are distinguished (since these are 
otherwise the same thing) as well as the "sides" or legs of a swap 
instrument. I wonder if these legal norms can be related to the concepts 
in the affordances thinking? If I understand it right, affordances terms 
could not be imported into an ontology directly or modelled as they 
stand, since they are seen from the perspective of the individual. They 
would have to be described in more neutral terms, in the same way that 
any internal experience in someone's mind is translated to a public 
language term. Does that make sense?    (09)

So perhaps when I get a spare moment I will revisit this and see whether 
any of the affordance concepts allow for some more detailed grounding of 
meanings of the global terms in the model.    (010)

Many thanks for the insights,    (011)

Mike    (012)

RK Stamper wrote:
>
> Dear Colleagues,
>
>  
>
> At last an opportunity to respond to comments on this thread.  Please 
> forgive the length. 
>
>  
>
> Mike Bennett asked:,
>
>  
>
> Ronald:   Is the approach you describe related to the system of "Norms and
>
> Affordances" described by James Backhouse of the London School of
>
> Economics? He and some colleagues have built a semantics system called
>
> "NORMA" which, to my initial casual reading of it, has a similar
>
> approach to what you describe.
>
>  
>
> Regrettably it is.  I supervised Backhouse's PhD until I moved with my 
> research programme to U. of Twente in the Netherlands. He preferred to 
> stay at the LSE but I continued to support him as his new supervisor 
> had no familiarity with our research. Backhouse avoided showing me his 
> thesis, disregarding our established practice of seeking expert 
> critical comment on all our work.  When I read a library copy I 
> understood why.  The trouble is evident in the paper you mention,
>
>  
>
> "Searching for Meaning – Performatives and Obligations in Public Key
>
> Infrastructures" (Tseng and Backhouse 2000),
>
>  
>
> which includes a semantic schema that was Backhouse's personal 
> contribution.  I find it useful for teaching: such a schema must obey 
> a few very strict constraints and he has furnished an excellent case 
> study of how to get the analysis thoroughly wrong. 
>
>  
>
> I looked at Backhouse's work a while ago, but I could not see how to
>
> relate it to other work in AI and logic, such as the works often
>
> referenced in here.
>
>  
>
> You are right to say that the "approach is very different" but when it 
> is garbled it is even more difficult to compare with the work often 
> cited in Ontolog discussions.
>
>  
>
> I would be intrigued as to how to relate these two bodies of work to 
> each other.
>
>  
>
> I'll do my best to help with these comparisons. Let me pick up a 
> remark by Pat Cassidy:
>
>  
>
> Ronald:  You raise interesting issues.  Do you have an ontology or 
> otherwise based computational system that demonstrates how you would 
> address them?  Or can you point to one?
>
>  
>
> We have not been aiming to construct an ontology (Ontolog sense) nor 
> primarily to develop a computational system, so that should be the 
> first point of comparison.  Our focus has been organized social 
> behavior governed by norms using legal norms as a major source of 
> empirical material. 
>
>  
>
> Nevertheless, to impose on ourselves a strict scientific methodology, 
> we formulated our hypotheses as computable formalisms, claiming them 
> to be capable of accommodating any fragment of legislation.  These 
> hypotheses were eminently refutable.  (I succumbed to Karl Popper's 
> influence immediately I arrived at the LSE.)
>
>  
>
> So we built a series of hypotheses and implemented each in a computer 
> system to handle legal norms.  Unsurprisingly, each one was quickly 
> refuted, pointing us towards an improved hypothesis. 
>
>  
>
> We now have a computer system that can implement most kinds of the 
> sophisticated administrative norms. 
>
>  
>
> Much earlier however, we discovered that huge improvements in computer 
> applications can be achieved by basing them on ontological dependency 
> schemas.   One such system was the administrative system for a 
> university built under Yasser Ades.  On this, the first attempt to 
> take the method from analysis to implementation, it far outperformed a 
> highly sophisticated package that had had the benefit of 200 previous 
> implementations. 
>
>  
>
> Already we can certainly contribute to practical business computing 
> even without using computer support for our analysis methods.  The 
> software now under development will automatically generate a computer 
> application to support a system specified in terms of semantic schema 
> plus the rules that people should obey.  Moreover the resulting system 
> is robust in the face of changing organizational requirements.
>
>  
>
> Building such a computer system does not provide a satisfactory formal 
> basis for our work. We acknowledge that we have much more work to do 
> on the formal aspects of the research.
>
>  
>
> Now that brings me to Pat Cassidy again:
>
>  
>
>     My current interest is purely practical - to help find a way to 
> enable semantic interoperability among computer systems.  That means 
> that computers will be able to transmit information among them and 
> automatically perform useful actions with the transmitted information, 
> without human intervention.
>
> I have been itching to attack a problem of this kind because I'm 
> convinced that our methods are well suited to it.  I am also convinced 
> that human intervention cannot be avoided.
>
>    In order to do this I believe that we need to encode that 
> information in a format at least as expressive as OWL-full for simple 
> applications, and at least FOL for the general case.  So any knowledge 
> representation system will be relevant to this task only when it has 
> been implemented with some form of reasoner.  I take it from your 
> explanation that your ontology has not yet been formalized in that way.
>
> Our current formalization goes quite a way in the direction you 
> indicate. 
>
> But formality is less important than arriving at insights that are 
> truly worth formalizing. 
>
> I believe that we have something new and worthy of formalization but 
> it does not seem to fit comfortably into the establish mould.  For 
> example, from my limited acquaintance with it, OWL allows one to model 
> all kinds of semantic confusion but, my God, it certainly looks 
> formal.  Our semantic schemas rule out many models acceptable to OWL.
>
> For another comparison, note that the system we are constructing 
> CANNOT be formalized completely. Each affordance exists as an 
> invariant between a start and a finish with an authority associated 
> with each of those events.  As those authorities are always rely upon 
> responsible human beings, our solutions can never be confined to 
> logical formulations either on paper or in computers. 
>
> Far from diminishing the role of formalization, we seek to maximize 
> it, subject to keeping it within its sphere of competence.  For 
> example, no logical system can supply information with any meaning or 
> intention. 
>
> Pat continues:
>
> I believe that the best prospect for achieving semantic 
> interoperability . . . is for the users to agree on using the same 
> common foundation ontology that is open to inclusion of elements from 
> any source, mediated by a technical committee that is also open for 
> membership.  The structure of that ontology, and the content of the 
> most basic ('primitive') concept representations will have to be 
> agreed to by the users.
>
> We support your contention.  Human beings have already arrived at a 
> huge corpus of shared perceptions, which they label in different 
> languages, dialects and jargons. We contend that, although each 
> culture fine-tunes those perceptions, a kernel is invariant across 
> cultures and languages.  That kernel is represented by a canonical 
> ontological dependency schema.
>
> Thus, in the little illustration I gave earlier    
> Society——————person_——————_marriage       the agents responsible for 
> the start and finish of the marriage determine the differences between 
> Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Parsee, Hindu and 
> other forms of marriage.
>
> The law, in its own domain, often spells out the important refinements 
> of meaning and specifies the people whose authority we should accept 
> when assigning operational meanings (the judge, a qualified medical 
> practitioner, a certified engineer of some discipline etc).
>
> Similarly designers of different computer systems, supposedly handling 
> perceptions in overlapping domains of discourse, may well have 
> presupposed different associated authorities.  I conjecture that our 
> kind of semantic schema provides a useful bridge between systems but 
> cannot eliminate the finer details of meaning, which will have to be 
> negotiated.  The negotiations may yield a precise compromise or only a 
> partial one with a clear understanding of the remaining semantic 
> fuzziness.
>
> Pat continues:
>
>  The COSMO ontology is open to inclusion of concept representations of 
> interest to anyone, provided that they are not logically contradictory 
> to other elements in the ontology.  . . . If a new language is 
> developed that is shown to have some superior practical utility, the 
> COSMO might be ported to that.
>
> But this problem can never be reduced to one in OWL, FOL, CL and 
> solved on paper.  I'd like to understand the role COSMO would play.
>
> People cannot be eliminated from this work and you rightly insist on 
> their involvement.  We take that to the point of insisting on no 
> jargon in our schemas.  One must employ the words of the users to make 
> sure that they understand what we are trying to do on their behalf.  
> Try showing them a page of  OWL!
>
> Jeff Schiffel made many valuable points and I'd like to comment on two.
>
>  
>
> References to norms, affordances, and other elements of organizational
>
> semiotics can be a bit hard to dig out.
>
>  
>
> Too true! And, when you find them, their meanings are far from fixed.  
> Because all meanings are made by people through discussion and 
> critical examination of each other's work, this can take a long time.  
> Internationally the process is expensive and error prone.  I truly 
> welcome the opportunity to obtain from Ontolog participants critical 
> reactions to my ideas.
>
>  
>
> The key to computability is in semantic normal forms. When natural
>
> language texts (along with the affordances) can be stated in SNF, then
>
> the resulting well-structured format may be stored in your favorite
>
> data- or knowledge base. Then you can do what you like.
>
>  
>
> Absolutely!  Our experience suggest that basing a system design on a 
> schema in the Semantic Normal Form will yield huge benefits whatever 
> techniques you employ beyond that point.
>
>  
>
> Pat Hayes provided excellent illustrations of Gibson's notion of an 
> affordance and concluded:
>
>  
>
> As you can see, these have to do with perception, and they have 
> nothing at all to do with culture or behavior. This is typical: Gibson 
> was primarily a perceptual psychologist, after all. 
>
>  
>
> That is so but Gibson's chapter The Meaningful Environment in his 
> Ecological Approach to Visual Perception raises as an aside the 
> question: What repertoires of behavior do other animals afford? 
>
>  
>
> We had been working with legal norms for a long time but immediately 
> on encountering Gibson's work it was clear that norms are the 
> invariants governing behavior in the social domain.  This seemed a 
> defensible extension to his Theory of Affordances into our domain of 
> interest.
>
>  
>
> More fundamentally, adopting and (mis?)using Gibson's idea resolved 
> and impasse: the conventional objectivist or Platonic ontologies do 
> not suit the legal world where one often sees reality under 
> construction in the courts and out of court in negotiations..  
> Gibson's account of perception allowed us to avoid preconceptions 
> about a ready-made, given reality and then to introduce the semiotic 
> process of arriving at a shared BELIEF about an objective reality 
> beyond the perceptual capabilities of individuals. 
>
>  
>
>  
>
> Jeff Schiffel and Pat Hayes discussed the rights and wrongs of 
> adopting Gibson's affordances without making careful reference to its 
> earlier meaning. 
>
>  
>
> I feel no obligation to work in the field of perceptual psychology, 
> having adopted Gibson's idea and perhaps bent it to my purpose.  I see 
> little distortion anyway apart from the fact that Gibson presumes an 
> objective reality whereas I wish to understand the mechanisms whereby 
> we arrive at a shared belief in an objective reality. 
>
>  
>
> I'm an engineer and I regard what I have done (hopefully) to solve a 
> difficult problem as no worse than bending a piece of metal from one 
> machine to serve my purpose in another.  The test is: Does it work?  
> HCI people are welcome to their interpretation (Paola).
>
>  
>
> -------------------
>
> Rob Freeman was supportive:
>
>  
>
> I quite like your "affordance" based approach to ontology. To me it
>
> emphasizes the subjectivity of category, whether that subjectivity be
>
> personal or social.
>
>  
>
> Were it possible to find a complete objective ontology this personal
>
> or social aspect would not be so important. That a personal or social
>
> aspect is so important strikes me as further evidence no complete,
>
> objective way of categorizing the world exists.  . . . because it should
>
> be clear social affordances might be very numerous . . .
>
>  
>
> Categories fit into our analysis in cognitive norms. The belief that 
> whales are a sub-category of fish was discarded a while ago.  That and 
> other generic/specific structures are quite different from the 
> perceptual norms that hold our ontological knowledge.
>
>  
>
> The law creates perceptual norms when it adds to the furniture of our 
> social world by starting and finishing the existence of things such as 
> copyrights, for example. Cognitive, evaluative and behavioral norms 
> rest on the foundation of our perceptual norms, whether directly 
> experienced or socially negotiated.
>
>  
>
> Norms themselves count among the social object we recognize; they are 
> started and finished, in the UK, by the Queen in Parliament. Norms of 
> all kinds remain invariant between their start and finish events – 
> that allows their component sub-norms to be added or deleted.
>
>  
>
>  
>
> Then the John Sowa and Patrick Cassidy continue the discussion of 
> interoperability about which I shall say no more for the moment.
>
>  
>
> -----------
>
>  
>
> Earlier, Ravi Sharma had raised a point about cyclic time appearing to 
> accept the possibility of cosmic time as a cyclic and repeating 
> processes.  I should conclude with a note about time in our view.
>
>  
>
> Our insistence on accepting only the present time rules that out of 
> our models.  Indeed, with only the present moment available to us, we 
> can vist neither the start or the finish of any realized affordance.  
> With a person, we can use their name and we can also visit them and 
> shake them by the hand but starts and finishes of things we can only 
> name.  Hence we only know times by their names, which we assign using 
> calendars and chronometers and structure using relationships of 
> simultaneity and sequence at a specified location. 
>
>  
>
> Start and finish EVENTS we do not confuse with beginning and ending 
> PROCESSES that we can experience and learn to recognize as potentially 
> leading to certain events as we formulate cognitive norms about causation.
>
>  
>
> Cyclic times are legion.  Institutions define for their own purposes 
> all kinds of taxation periods, charging periocs, semesters, terms.  
> Our schemas are often littered with them.
>
>  
>
>  
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 1:18 PM, Conklin, Don <don.conklin@xxxxxxxx 
> <mailto:don.conklin@xxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>
>     John,
>
>     I'm going to disagree with you here (and I tend to agree with a lot of
>     what you say, BTW). The reason you can effectively communicate
>     with the
>     cast of characters in your examples requires much, much more than the
>     lowest level task common definitions. Many of these things are of the
>     sort that would be in a foundational ontology. Let me try to list them
>     to buttress my assertion;
>            * Time
>            * Location
>            * Interdependencies in general and specifically for each domain
>     your character is working in
>            * A host of concepts:
>                    -contracts
>                    -Residential building codes
>                    -budgeting
>                    -competitive pricing
>                    -anatomy
>                    -nutrition
>                    -locale specific cuisine
>                    -context to parse the communications correctly
>
>     Like you, I have communicated successfully in countries where I
>     did not
>     speak the language by a variety of gestures and pointing to objects
>     whose meaning facilitated common understanding. Once again, I think
>     there was sufficient grounding in enough concepts (like those above)
>     that the Chinese salesman in Kowloon was able to get me to understand
>     that I would pay less for the watch I wanted if I used my VISA card
>     instead of my American Express card.
>
>     I don't think there will ever be universal agreement on a foundational
>     ontology that would have enough to it to be useful. I do think the
>     challenge for the application of semantic technologies is the
>     development of the capability to not only resolve definitions of terms
>     in namespaces when mapping between ontologies but to extend one's own
>     representation to include new concepts when encountered.
>
>     Don
>
>     -----Original Message-----
>     From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>     <mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>     [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>     <mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>] On Behalf Of John F.
>     Sowa
>     Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2008 5:27 PM
>     To: [ontolog-forum]
>     Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Looking forward at the past
>
>     Pat,
>
>     You have made statements like that for a long time, but I fail
>     to see any evidence for that claim:
>
>     PC> I believe that the best prospect for achieving semantic
>     > interoperability among a very wide number of users is for the
>     > users to agree on using the same common foundation ontology
>     > that is open to inclusion of elements from any source, mediated
>     > by a technical committee that is also open for membership.
>     > The structure of that ontology, and the content of the most
>     > basic ('primitive') concept representations will have to be
>     > agreed to by the users.
>
>     For example, I may achieve "semantic interoperability" with
>     a plumber, a dentist, a clerk at the supermarket, a waiter
>     at a restaurant, and a contractor who makes some repairs to
>     my house.
>
>     But in each case, the agreement is on specific task-oriented
>     details.  There is never any need for the six of us to agree
>     on a foundational ontology.  Instead, the agreement is always
>     on very low-level task-oriented details that are different
>     for each pair of interactions.
>
>     Sometimes, I successfully interoperate with people whose knowledge
>     of English is limited to a tiny subset that covers that task.  For
>     most of our common purposes, that subset is adequate.  But if an
>     exception occurs, we may need to call a supervisor to mediate.
>
>     The issues most important for interoperability of two agents
>     X and Y are limited to a very narrow *intersection* of the
>     knowledge that X and Y have.  If agent X interacts with Y and Z,
>     X may use different intersections with each of them that have
>     very little in common.
>
>     For the plumber, dentist, clerk, waiter, and contractor, that
>     common intersection includes dollars, cents, counting, and the
>     basic knowledge of the physical world that I share with my cat.
>     When I interact with Amazon.com, you can even omit the physical
>     world.
>
>     John
>
>
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