On Jan 29, 2009, at 5:55 AM, Azamat wrote: (01)
> On Thursday, January 29, 2009 1:15 AM, Sean aked:
> "is there a formal definition of an ontology?"
>
> Good question. It seems there are as many definitions as many
> schools,
> researchers and developers.
> But the right one is that involving the original nature and meaning of
> ontology as:
> "Formal Ontology is the formal study of Reality". (02)
That is the definition of ontology, the philosophical field. When the
word is used in this (original) sense, the construction "an ontology"
is ungrammatical. The sense of "ontology" agreed to in this forum
dates back less than two decades, and has its origin in AI, not
philosophy. While the two senses are related, its important not to get
them confused with one another. (03)
PatH (04)
> The issue of issues is how
> Reality is related with the whole world (the totality of entities and
> relations), particular worlds, or possible worlds; and how it could
> be truly
> and consistently represented and effectively reasoned [by humans and
> machines].
>
> Azamat Abdoullaev
> http://www.eis.com.cy
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Sean Barker" <sean.barker@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2009 1:15 AM
> Subject: [ontolog-forum] Is there something I missed?
>
>
>>
>>
>> Folks
>>
>> Having followed this forum for some time, I have a feeling that I
>> may have
>> missed something so obvious that no-one has thought to mention it -
>> that
>> is,
>> is there a formal definition of an ontology? An ontology cannot be
>> just be
>> a
>> bowl of axiom soup, so how does one tell that a particular
>> collection of
>> axioms is an ontology - the question is posed on the analogy that
>> mathematicians differentiate between a group, a ring and a field by
>> the
>> axioms they include. My naive guess for this would be based on set
>> theory,
>> and look something like:
>>
>> 1) A set S can be defined as S = {x s.t. x satisfies some
>> combination of
>> predicates};
>> 2) Given a set of predicicates P = {p1, p2,...,pn} and a set of
>> logical
>> operaters L = {l1, l2,...,ln} (perhaps just AND, OR and NOT), then
>> denote
>> Spl as a set defined from some combination of predicates in P and
>> operators
>> in L, and Spl* is the set of all possible sets Spl (perhaps
>> regularised to
>> remove contraditions);
>> 3) An ontology is constructed by taking a collection of sets from
>> Spl* and
>> identifying a partial ordering of those sets using the usual subset
>> relationship.
>>
>> This would split the study of ontology into three area:
>> 1) the formal problem of ontology as being concerned with the types
>> of
>> mappings (homomorphisms, homeomorphisms, etc) between different
>> ontologies
>> based on the choices from some Spl*
>> 2)the practical problem as finding an ontology that supports the
>> decision
>> procedures in a particular process (I include classifying something
>> as a
>> decision procedure).
>> 3) the computational problem of defining of terminating and efficient
>> procedures for comparing ontologies and mapping between them.
>> (Thanks to Pat Hayes for this suggestion - even his more acerbic
>> comments
>> can be quite enlightening.)
>>
>> I would then expect there to have been a number of competing
>> definitions,
>> and any number of arguements discussing the relative merits of these
>> definitions. And possibly some argument demostrating that this whole
>> approach is flawed.
>>
>> My question is, where are these definitions and the ensuing
>> arguments? and
>> is there a good summary of these?
>>
>> Sean Barker
>> Bristol, UK
>>
>>
>>
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> (05)
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