Hello Now,
I’ve been watching this thread on standard ontologies
for a bit now…I even dared stick my head in the lion’s mouth a
couple of times by posting.
I realise the thread is supposed to be about using
ontologies in standards. Although that doesn’t preclude everyone doing
their own thing (it certainly hasn’t before in the world of standards),
it would perhaps make sense if these standards *could* all descend from
a common foundation. By foundation, I mean what Rich was calling an
Ultra-High-Level Ontology – i.e. ontic categories and relationships.
Has anyone looked into the possibility of a foundation that
covers the whole gamut ? First order, higher order, intensional,
extensional (my sense), etc. ? RDF/RDFS gives us classes, type-instance, and
sub-super. It just doesn’t have individuals (my sense, ”something
with spatio-temporal extent”). RDFS covers higher order and first order
by dint of not restricting how RDF:type is used. All it lacks is a grounding in
physical extent, which is understandable as it was designed to refer to stuff
in cyberspace rather than stuff I can kick.
The difficulty, I suspect is in the intensional vs
extensional bit. In BORO/ISO15926/IDEAS, we would have one class with many
names (e.g. “Equiangular Triangle”, “Equilateral
Triangle”), whereas the intensional folks would have two classes, perhaps
with an equivalence relationship between them. Has anyone analysed the nature
of these two approaches and come up with a common foundation for both, or are
they so fundamentally different it can’t be done ? Surely some logician
or philosopher must have cracked this ?
The SC4 resources, at one time, had class_by_intension and
class_by_extension in them, not sure if there was anything to join them up
though. I think David Leal did the work on this.
Cheers
--
Ian
Bailey
www.modelfutures.com
T:
+44 207 193 4605
M: +44
7768 892362
Skype
Model Futures Limited is
a company registered in England and Wales with company number 05248454
Registered Company
Address: 1 Nelson Street, Southend-On-Sea, Essex, SS1 1EG
VAT Number:
848 7357 75
MOD
FATS/II: FATS/2/MFL
DGFM
Supplier Code: 46945