Dear Mike, (01)
Thanks for your response. (02)
Before we take the discussion further, I would like to communicate
with you off the Ontolog line to find a concrete case in the area you
have sketched that I can use to illustrate the methods I have tried to
outline. I am confident that we can apply the ideas about norms and
affordances to the field of financial service. (03)
Our new methods seem to belong to quite a different paradigm from the
one shared by the regular Ontolog community that I'm sure to be
misunderstood until I can work through a concrete case and have the
benefit of your detailed comments. Then I may at last reach the
Ontology audience. (04)
Would you be willing? (05)
Regards, (06)
Ronald (07)
On 11/7/08, Mike Bennett <mbennett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Ronald,
>
> 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.
>
> 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 listed as "unpublished PdD Thesis" which has made it difficult to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.
>
> 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.
>
> Here is how I see things, please feel free to knock it down.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
> 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.
>
> Many thanks for the insights,
>
> Mike
>
> RK Stamper wrote: (08)
[see earlier contribution]
> > (09)
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