On Feb 10, 2009, at 2:58 PM, Ian Bailey wrote: Ahem...maybe you should have looked a bit closer :)
Maybe I should have looked at all. A thing is an
individual, a type or a tuple - i.e. it is the most general category in the
foundation.
And is that a taxonomy, so everything is in one of those categories and they are disjoint? An individual is anything with spatial and temporal extent. A
type a set of things. A tuple is an n-ary relationship between things.
Hmm, that seems to leave no room for any abstractions or platonic entities. Numbers, ideas, concepts, words? How about such things as shapes or forms or directions? Or substances? None of these have spatiotemporal extents, so they aren't individuals, and they aren't tuples, and they sure don't seem to be types.
Don't forget we're extensional, so we can't have any of this nonsense of a
type also being an individual
Then you are really confused, since this "nonsense" does not in any way contradict extensionality. And this nonsense is so incredibly useful that I for one, and hundreds of ontologists in the bioinformatics and medical-information fields, are not willing to do without it. Without this, in fact, your scheme is dead in the water, IMO. - our definition of individual is very clear.
The foundation specialisation tree is:
-Thing
-Individual
-Type
-Powertype
-TupleTyple
-IndividualType
-Name
-NameType
-tuple (thing, thing, thing, ...etc.)
-couple (thing, thing)
-superSubtype (type, type)
-typeInstance (type, thing)
-powertypeInstance (powertype, type)
-nameTypeInstance (nametype, name)
-namedBy (thing, name)
-triple (thing, thing, thing)
-quadruple (thing, thing, thing, thing)
-quintuple (thing, thing, thing, thing, thing)
Hope this helps.
It sure helps give me an idea of why I will never use this rigid, ugly, oldfashioned style of formalization ever again. I feel like a LISP programmer who is being told I ought to use Fortran 5 :-)
You guys should have started with Common Logic rather than Quine, then you could have tossed all this out the window. Just as a tiny sample, think how handy it is to have a relation AllDifferent, which is not-equal applied to any number of arguments. It boils down a conjunction of N.(N-1) negated atomic sentences to one single atom.
Pat
PS -we've never had need to use triple, quadruple or quintuple, but Chris said we should have them, and we believed him. -----Original Message----- From: Pat Hayes [ mailto:phayes@xxxxxxx] Sent: 10 February 2009 20:45 To: ian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; [ontolog-forum] Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] standard ontology On Feb 10, 2009, at 2:12 PM, Ian Bailey wrote: Hi John,
You wrote "there is no foundation ontology that anyone could hope to
recommend". Well, I personally recommend IDEAS, but then again I
would.
I'd actually like to understand what you (and anyone else) think
constitutes
a foundation ontology. We're pretty clear about it in IDEAS - it's
the set
of ontic categories (thing, type, tuple, individual)
OK, I havn't looked at IDEAS closely, but already I have problems with it. What is the distinction between Thing and Individual? Why can a Type not be a Thing? (Certainly it is extremely useful to be able to assert properties of and relations between types: can you do that without saying the Type is a Thing or an Individual? If so, what kind of logic do you use?) BTW, I wouldn't describe this list as an ontology at all, more like the underlying formalism of an ontology. I would add immediately that this isnt a clear boundary, but your list here doesn't seem to be about the world being described so much as about the apparatus you propose to use to describe it. This is the kind of thing that is built- in in RDFS and OWL, for example. plus their
relationships (sub-super, type-instance, etc.), plus the naming
pattern
(based on Chris's ideas, which are based on Quine's).
Quine was a strict nominalist. Does IDEAS agree with Quine that to be, is to be the value of a bound variable? (We had to resoundingly reject that dictum in the IKRIS project, when working with a variety of formalisms, all making different Quinean ontic commitments; and I am sure it will not survive on the Web, where one man's fiction is another man's reality.) We set this bit of the
ontology in stone and bind implementations (our UML Profile, our RDBMS
structure and our RDFS projections) against it.
IDEAS is layered; foundation, common patterns, subject areas
Thats where the ontology starts, I would say. And the higher-level ontology is about subject areas that crop up just about everywhere: time, location, processes, substances, abstract vs. concrete things, etc. Pat H , local
extensions. The governance is strong at the top and weak at the
bottom.
Stuff introduced at the bottom (e.g. by a local user) can be
promoted up the
governance regime if there is benefit to other users. It does mean
we can
end up with local extensions that are not synchronised, but
everything has
to descend from the top, so we can always go up the tree until we have
common understanding. The whole thing kinda relies on BORO though,
as we use
extension as our criterion for identification.
I suspect you mean something more by "foundation" though - maybe
what we'd
call foundation + common patterns ? For example, would you see a
foundation
having things like "person", "process" (can of worms, that one) and
"document" in it ?
Cheers
--
Ian
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F.
Sowa
Sent: 10 February 2009 17:38
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] standard ontology
Pat C, Pat H, and Ian,
PC> ... there is the practical question of whether we intend
to recommend one foundation ontology as the basis for the
formalization, or take a hands-off position and let a
thousand incompatible flowers bloom?
Three points: (1) there is no foundation ontology that anyone
could hope to recommend, (2) there are already thousands of
flowers and weeds, and (3) there is no consensus about which
are the flowers and which are the weeds.
Therefore, we cannot recommend any single ontology, and we
must accommodate the totality of those that have proved to
be useful to at least some narrow group.
PH> Nobody heeds such an all-encompassing ontology, however.
Each standardization effort is devoted to a relatively narrow
range of topics and concerns, compared to the full range of
all possible standards.
I strongly agree.
IB> ... you need to get your hands dirty and look at the legacy
data. You can carry out academic exercises mapping models and
doing gap analyses, but these never work when it comes to the
real world.
Certainly. Anything that has lasted long enough to become
a legacy has passed the most important test of all: it works.
That is an enormous advantage over proposals that have not
been tested or deployed on any practical application.
PC> I feel strongly that getting some agreement among at least
one large user community on the content of *some* foundation
ontology should be a very high priority objective until it
is accomplished, regardless of how often we have talked
about it. Other tasks are IMHO at least secondary, and
perhaps dependent on the first.
No, most definitely *not*! I strongly agree with Pat Hayes:
PH> Getting such agreement is both unnecessary and probably
impossible. It would achieve nothing other the creation of
a huge and unusable formalization which would then be ignored
for almost all applications, being too unwieldy and needlessly
complicated and mired in pointless controversy to be usefully
applied to any particular domain.
A working system always trumps a pie-in-the-sky dream.
As a theoretician, I am in favor of dreaming. But as somebody
who worked at a profit-making institution for 30 years, I
realize the importance of grounding those dreams in reality.
Therefore, the primary requirement for any theoretical proposal
must be a smooth migration path from where we are today (namely,
the thousands of weeds and flowers) to the promised land flowing
with milk and honey.
John
PS: That metaphor of milk and honey reminds me of a cartoon
that showed Moses leading a bunch of people dressed in flowing
robes, dripping with sticky white stuff. We need a migration
path that takes advantage of the sticky stuff, instead of
getting mired in it.
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