Hi Pat,
I don’t think IDEAS works for everyone…Rich was
suggesting it’s adoption as a UHLO, and I admire his enthusiasm, but there
are too many schools of thought at play here for one common foundation to ever
work. In answer to your questions:
1)
Never even thought about it. Doubt I’ll ever have to. Don’t
let me stop you thinking about it though, I’d be interested to hear what
you discover.
2)
We just analyse stuff as we need it, and so far we haven’t
needed this. Chris Partridge has done a lot of work recently on movement of
aircraft – he’s probably done a lot of the analysis you discuss
there. I guarantee everything he’s done descends from the ontic
categories I mentioned earlier though.
3)
Er…the type-type sets have types in them, the non-type
sets have things that aren’t types in them. That’s if I’ve
understood you correctly. If you want to discuss this sort of stuff, you’re
better engaging with Matthew and Chris, who’ve actually bothered to go
and read books on logic and philosophy.
4)
Never thought about it, but I can’t see why not. The
bigger question is why on earth would you ?
5)
Purple is a type, it’s extent is all things that are
purple. Being square is membership of the type “square things”. MotherOf
is a couple, though you may also wish to define other things like birth, which
would be a type of individual, my son’s birth is an individual – it
had spatio temporal extent, and had as it’s parts, a temporal state of
his mother, a temporal state of him, a temporal state of the birthing suite, a
temporal state of the midwife, and a highly stressed temporal state of me. A
death mask is obviously an individual (it has an extent). There is a temporal extent
of it when it was touching a corpse’s face (haven’t we all ?). Moby
Dick, even 2nd edition of Moby Dick is a type. The copy of Moby Dick
on my bookshelf is an individual. An e-mail is a type, the rendition of it on
my screen is an individual. I think all this is based on Strawson’s utterance
work, but you’d have to ask Chris about that…me no do philosophy.
Me engineer.
I think the points you raise are very interesting arguments, and
I’m glad someone’s thinking about stuff like that. If I ever decide
to do an ontology about Sherlock Holmes investigating quantum uncertainty of
death masks whilst simultaneously conjecturing about sets which contain themselves,
you’ll be the first person I call….just don’t expect a call
any time soon.
Ta
--
Ian
From: Pat Hayes [mailto:phayes@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 11 February 2009 05:44
To: ian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] standard ontology
On Feb 10, 2009, at 3:53 PM, Ian Bailey wrote:
Does anybody read past the first sentence before firing off
responses to the
exploder ?
As I said earlier, this is the IDEAS *foundation*. I did ask what your
understanding of "foundation" was in a previous posting...I guess I
got my
response, albeit not quite in the manner I expected.
Under the foundation, we have common patterns for agent, process, etc.
As for syntax...I seem to recall getting a severe beasting from Pat for
suggesting RDF is just a syntax (it is).
I helped define and RDF, and I wrote the semantics
specification document, which is normative. RDF is not just a syntax.
Repetition of a mistake does not stop it being a mistake. By repeating it, you
are just making yourself look sillier.
The IDEAS categories are
extensional, therefore tightly coupled to the real world.
? I fail to see the connection here. Set theory is
extensional. Group theory is extensional.
I can choose to
represent them in RDFS if I wish, 'cos it's a syntax.
You can indeed, but not for that reason.
In the previous mail,
I represented them as a tree of text...which is also a syntax. I could also
barcode them on my backside, 'cos that's a syntax (in fact I have, but
that's a private matter). Because we bothered to record our criteria for
identity of the IDEAS categories, we can be confident of what they are.
Because we know what they are, we don't give a monkey's what we use to
represent them. I realise this a quite a long way down the mail, so you
won't be reading it, but here goes again:
INDIVIDUALS have spatio-temporal extent (i.e. you can kick them, or could
kick them in the past / future)
TYPES are identified by their members - which could be individuals, types or
tuples
TUPLES are identified by their ends
OK, I've read all the way down. Now, let me respond. First,
OK y'all have described your system quite tightly and thoroughly, which is
good. But you are also stuck in a cul-de-sac, apparently paying no attention to
the rest of the world, which is not good. You don't understand RDF and RDFS,
which maybe isn't itself very important but I fear may be only a symptom of a
deeper malaise. You mis-use established terminology ("individual"
here being the worst culprit: that isn't what everyone else means by
"individual". For example, the number three is an individual, but not
one of yours.) Just generally, you appear to not know about basics like the
distinction between syntax and semantics, what 'extensional' means, the
difference between actual and possible, and so on. Look, I'm not meaning to
criticize or pull rank here, just letting you know that there is a big
ontological world out there, and before suggesting that your brand-new minor
variation on a theme by Aristotle is the final answer to the world's problems,
it might be a good idea to try reading a little more about what others have
done. You aren't the first people to invent a formalized system for
representing general knowledge, and you ought to at least know a little bit
about what was already done. After all, suggesting any ontology as a
possible general ontology standard amounts to making a VERY large
philosophical claim, one that most professional philosophers or ontologists
would hesitate to even approach. At the very least, it surely behooves one to know
just a little about the field in which one is making such grand suggestions.
Like knowing what some of the long words mean, and being able, or maybe
willing, to actually read and understand the specifications of the notations
one is bandying about.
Here's a few questions for y'all.
(1) Is Sherlock Holmes an individual? One might say he is
located in a possible space-time, but not in the actual one. Do you want
to say that? If so, how are the many possible but non-actual space-times
related to one another, if at all? If not, what do you want to say about S.H. ?
(2) How much extent is required? Is the event of a quantum
being emitted by a sodium atom's moving from a higher to lower energetic state
an Individual? (How does one kick that?) Are things like vortices in a fluid,
waves on the ocean, burstings into flame, explosions all Individuals? (How does
one kick them?) Is an acceleration an Individual? (Say my truck goes from zero
to 30 in about a minute when I set off to work tomorrow. Is that acceleration
an Individual? How does one kick it?)
(3) You say a type is identified by its members,
which I take to mean that if it has the same members, its the same type. That
sounds like saying that a type is a set. Is a type a set, in fact? If not, how
do they differ from sets? If they are, are all sets types? If not, what
distinguishes the type-type sets from the non-type-type sets?
(4) You say that a type can be a member of a type (which is
good, and not un-extensional.) Can a type be a member of itself? More
generally, can there be circles of type-membership, so that A is a type of B is
a type of C is a type of A ? If not, why not?
(5) Into which basic ontic category would you put the
following: the number three; the color purple; the property of being square;
the relation between people of being the natural mother of ; the
shape of a face (in the sense in which a death mask has the same shape as
the face it is a casting of); the Krebs cycle in cellular biology; Moby
Dick, the novel by Melville (not any particular imprint or edition of it,
but the work itself); a website (c.f. the current W3C debates over the notion
of an "information resource"); an email message; the sentences in
that same email message; a substance (such as clay or air: not any particular
piece of it, but the stuff itself); a time-interval? I realize this is a
longish list, but since you have your identity criteria so well defined, you
ought to be able to rattle them off pretty quickly.
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: 10 February 2009 21:27
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] standard ontology
Ian and Pat,
I agree with Pat:
PH> 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.
The following classification is closer to a description of the
permissible syntactic categories:
-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)
Common Logic, for example, is called a logic rather
than an ontology. But it is possible to define a dialect
of CL that uses the labels above to name the syntactic
features of CL.
- A thing is anything named by a CL name.
- A type is a monadic relation that is used as a
restriction on a quantified name.
But as Pat said, the boundary isn't clear. You could say that
your system does make the following "ontological commitment":
- If there exists a thing x and a thing y, then there exists
a couple consisting of x and y.
In CLIF, that statement could be written as the following axiom:
(forall (x y) (exists (z) (= z (couple x y))))
However, this level of commitment is far below what you would
get from adopting any first-order logic plus some obvious
mathematical theories that can be axiomatized in FOL: sets,
functions, relations, integers, real numbers, etc.
But that is still very far from giving us an ontology that can
represent all the stuff of science, engineering, business, etc.
John
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