Dear Ronald, (01)
Got your mail. I think it would be useful to look at something like
foreign exchange trading or over the counter derivatives, with reference
to the FpML standard and the workflows documented by the FpML folks. I
can identify the reference data and transaction data components of these
and look at how the meanings of these two dimensions could be captured. (02)
Best regards, (03)
Mike (04)
Ronald Stamper wrote:
> Dear Mike,
>
> Thanks for your response.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Would you be willing?
>
> Regards,
>
> Ronald
>
> 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 listed as "unpublished PdD Thesis" which has made it difficult to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:
>>
>
> [see earlier contribution]
>
>> >
>>
>
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