Dear Mike, (01)
<snip>
> Also where available, I would want to align with good academoc work
> like
> Bill McCarthy's REA material for transactions and economic behaviour. (02)
[MW] Oh. Actually I do not like this much. For me this is the wrong sort of
generalisation, that can end up becoming a straightjacket, rather than a
liberator for the detailed view, but I am aware it is popular, and there are
certainly worse things about.
>
> This possibly ties in with Ronald Stamper's concept of having an
> "Affordance", whereby a class of thing is defined as real because it is
> detected as such. (03)
[MW] I like this much less. Things do not exist or not because you have
detected them or not. (and we were doing so well earlier). (04)
<snip>
> > [MW] Yes, when I was developing Shell's Downstream Data Model we did
> this.
> > One of the things we found quite important (but didn't necessarily
> manage in
> > every case) was to identify the different levels of abstraction
> > (generalization) that it was useful to have. We identified (at least)
> 3.
> >
>
> Me too, though I didn't name them or segregate them as such:
>
> > 1. An upper ontology level (including wholes and parts,
> subtype/supertype,
> > classification, representation, time, and physical quantities).
> >
>
> I used the top level of John Sowa's lattice for this, adding things
> like
> Set, Part, Temporal Thing as required. My end result could probably be
> more scientific though and would benefit from being replaced by
> something anointed by the ontology community. (05)
[MW] Do you mean his lattice of theories (which I like) or his Peircian
upper ontology (which I don't like)? (06)
The DDM was of course based on ISO 15926 which has a 4D foundation with
possible worlds and non-well founded sets. (07)
The bad news is that there is no consensus on an upper ontology here, nor
likely to be. We might perhaps come up with a small number of them though,
and that would be a step forward.
>
> > 2. A generic level (contract, party, product, ...)
> >
>
> Here I followed Bill McCarthy's example and defined the things at this
> level as archetypes (yet another non OWL feature). Then the necessary
> facts about something like a contract are defined at this level, as
> well
> as what sort of "Thing" contract is in terms of the 3 layers at Level 1
> (continuant, independent etc.). Likewise for Jurisdiction etc. - there
> should be well established definitions in international law for all
> these, though I am still looking for these. There are quite a few such
> things, so I separated them into Legal, Geographical, Mathematical and
> so on, along with more loosely defined "Core" and "Business", all of
> which could probably be sharpened up a lot by good ontology
> practitioners. Meanwhile I needed them in place anyway. (08)
[MW] Well see above about McCarthy, but otherwise I agree about the
approach about finding the authoritative definitions. Of course these can
often be disappointing because the people who come up with them are not
always good at formulating definitions.
<snip> (09)
Regards (010)
Matthew West
Information Junction
Tel: +44 560 302 3685
Mobile: +44 750 3385279
matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/ (011)
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