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
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