Hi Paola,
I remember getting into this discussion at a NATO meeting once.
I actually don’t think those things are intangible. In fact, I don’t think
anything is, we just need to get behind the names to figure out what is being
referred to, and most people are too lazy to bother. If the reference is to a
particular hostility, then it’s an individual – we know its extent (which may
be scattered – e.g. the London tube bombings). If we’re talking about how to
classify hostile behaviour then it’s a type of individual – its members are all
hostile activities that are undertaken. You have to be clear about what is understood
to be hostile and by whom, so it may need clarifying in the name you actually
give it – e.g. ConsideredHostileByUSGovt, ConsideredHostileByUKGovt, etc.
The classic example Chris Partridge always brings up is
Agreement. Most people things it’s intangible, but that’s just because the word
can refer to many things in the real world, and as it’s so commonly used, we
become so relaxed about it we unintentionally conflate its senses into an
intangible muddle. It could mean the act of signing the agreement (an individual).
It could be the agreement text (a type, or if we mean a physical signed copy,
an individual). It could mean the end-to-end process that takes place under the
agreement – e.g. a building services company might describe their ongoing maintenance
of a building for a customer as their “agreement”.
Partridge is a great believer in testing the extent behind a
term. He reckons if two people are not sure whether they are talking about the
same thing we should try and find an example which one thinks is a (e.g.) hostility
and the other does not. Then they are talking about different things. This avoids
the problem of saying that hostility has an (abstract) essence…but you still
need to do the work figure out what the extent is.
My point is that there’s not much point doing ontology if you’re
unclear about what it is you are referring to (although it doesn’t seem to stop
most people…leaving myself wide open for a babooning from Pat there). If you think
something is intangible, it’s just that you haven’t pushed hard enough on it to
work out all its senses and related objects. Usually, something seen as
intangible turns out to be a pattern of many things – e.g. you can’t just have
one object in the ontology to correspond to your term. People tend to fight
this – it’s counter-intuitive. I think getting over the name bias is the key to
developing a useful ontology. Can’t say I’ve got over it myself yet though.
Cheers
--
Ian
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of paola.dimaio@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: 22 February 2009 18:49
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: [ontolog-forum] intangibles
Ian
thanks for the pointers
>From this link I get a summary view of IDEAS and BORO's, at last
http://www.ideasgroup.org/file_download/3/MOD+Ontology.pdf
May I ask, how does it deal with intangible entities? (such as 'threat' or
'hostility' , for example)
Does it just ignore them , deny they exist, or does it always correlate an
intangible to a tangible entity?
Admittedly there are things that you cant kick, such as the wind
Do uppen ontologies all have this characteristic of only modelling tangibles?
thanks
Paola Dm
On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Ian Bailey <ian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Paola,
The website is http://www.ideasgroup.org.
There's not much more than the foundation on there right now. Chris Partridge
and I are working on the documentation now with a target of release in June 09.
There have been a couple of
implementations. Unfortunately, the customer asked us to tackle subject areas
which didn't lend themselves well to ontology, so they're not exactly paradigm
shifting apps. You can download the country-code demo from http://www.modaf.com/News/69/mod-ontology-demonstrator-released
PS - The UK sponsor is Luigi
Gregori, who I think you already know.
Cheers
--
Ian
Ian
ok, got me tickin
can we have a link to the IDEAS ontology
cant find it, thanks!
PDM
On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 4:53 AM, Ian Bailey <ian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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). The IDEAS categories are
extensional, therefore tightly coupled to the real world. I can choose to
represent them in RDFS if I wish, 'cos it's a syntax. 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
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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