PatH,
I had occasion, years back when I was doing DNA
research, to coin a term “isagelous” to refer to abstract informational
objects that have the same information content, but in different physical or
syntactic form. It is from Greek, “iso” meaning “same”
and “agelos” meaning “information”. It can apply
to a sequence of DNA and its corresponding RNA transcript, or to a file and its
compressed version, or to a message and its encrypted form. It also might
be applied to different implementations of the same algorithm in different
computer languages, if there are no functional differences.
Thus – “they are isagelous
implementations of the same algorithm”
Would this serve?
Pat
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pat Hayes
Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 1:02 PM
To: [ontolog-forum] ; Matthew West
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] RDF & RDFS (was... Is there something I
missed?)
On Feb 6, 2009, at 1:28 AM, Matthew West wrote:
PS - I'm not sure about
where this idea of a mental model of an ontology
came from. I never mentioned it, and I certainly don't have an ontology in
my head. Of course the ontology has to be represented in some way - CL,
RDFS, OWL, UML, EXPRESS, arse-barcodes, who cares ?
What is this thing that
is in common between al these different file formats? Where is it, if not in
your head? This is rather like the old chestnut of saying what exactly a
program is, if you can write the 'same' program in several wildly different
programming languages. For example, quicksort can be implemented in just about
any programming language, and its still quicksort. In CS we have the useful
distinction between algorithm and program, maybe we need a similar
terminological distinction for ontologies. Any suggestions?
[MW] Ok. So is the quicksort program in
your head the same as the quicksort program in my head (I even remember writing
one once in Basic)? Talking about what is in someone’s head just
doesn’t cut it I’m afraid. It is at best a loose way of talking.
Speaking as a card-carrying cognitive scientist, I have to
disagree. We have to be taking intuitions seriously here. They are our
prime, perhaps our only, source of guidance when writing formal theories.
I think that fear of talking about intuitions is a residue
of the intellectual blight caused by behaviorist psychology. Ironically,
behaviorism has been a rejected methodology in psychology for about 30 years
now, but the news of its demise seems not to have reached everywhere else yet.
Where you have several things that have
something in common, what you do have is an abstraction, and my extensional
analysis would make that a class.
Fine, but that says nothing. Any set of things is a class:
but a class containing, say, a C++ implementaiton of Quicksort and a LISP
implementation of a parser, isn't any kind of algorithmic abstraction. What
makes some classes useful is that their instances have something in common: and
that thing that they have in common has to be more than just being in the same
class, to avoid circularity.
So if I have 5 copies of the same content
There, that will do. Its the content that they have
in common.
, there is a class that represents the
pattern
or is the pattern? See my point? Its impossible
to avoid talking of this thing-in-common, whatever it is. Maybe we should face
up to this need, and agree on a common terminology.
that is common to those 5 files. And if I
have the “same” ontology that is represented in different
languages, then there is a class that represents that sameness.
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