Hi Patrick, (01)
Sorry for the delayed reply. (02)
A couple of thoughts interleaved below... (03)
Patrick Cassidy wrote:
>> Independent/Relative/Mediating
>> Concrete/Abstract
>> Continuant/Occurrent
>>
>>
>
> Mike, I haven't found partitions along those lines to be useful. There are
> disjoint categories such as "Event" and "Object" and "AttributeValue" to
> which I can give some necessary conditions. But in trying to represent the
> basic elements of thought, which are reflected in the basic language, there
> are too many ways of viewing things to make it practical to try to squeeze
> all those views into a few top partitions.
> (04)
This is precisely why I would not want to try to represent all the
elements of human thought, even the basic ones, until we can do
something a lot simpler and represent the reality in which a business
exists. And similar challenges for the reality in which buildings exist
and so on. (05)
This is why I do not think that a foundation vocubalary for a
human-language dictionary like Longman is a useful reference point for
helping machines that belong to businesses to talk to one another,
though I can see that a lot of very usful ideas come out of it. (06)
A few people have commented along the way, that these top level
categories are not useful. However that doesn't give me much to agree or
disagree with, so perhaps I can outline some brief thoughts: (07)
Independent/Relative/Mediating: (08)
These categories have been figured out by a whole range of philosophers
under different words. John Sowa gives a better explanation than I could
both of the history and the thinking. My practical engineering take on
this is that here is a set of partititions which is well attested, which
works, and which can be explained to anyone very simply (by principle or
example or both). (09)
It also directly solves real business problems, though a good database
engineer should not need to call in an ontologist to figure out that
clients, counterparties, underwriters of a security issue and so on
should not each be defined with a phone number and an address. However
I've seen database models in the financial sector which attempt to do
just that. So I have used these concepts to explain to them how a better
conceptual model would avoid such things. (010)
So this is just plain simple engineering: a Relative Thing is a concept
which is only meaningful in relation to some context (the Mediating
Thing, for example Securities Issuance). Each Relative Thing also has a
single, simple relationship to some kind of Independent Thing - the
business, person or whatever that actually has an address, a bank
account and so on. By the way I'm using capitals to denote classes of
Thing. (011)
The other two I agree are less clear cut, and in both cases they also
represent some specific ontological commitment which would rightly vary
from one ontology to another. However, having a partitition for
Occurrent Things is very useful for representing things which are an
Event, an Activity, a Process and so on. You would not get far modeling
things about financial securities for example without some way of
modeling those. However, to align such a model with other ontologies one
would have to find some way of relating the different kinds of time
scales against which something is defined as an occurrent or a
continuant thing (for instance the reign of a king can be described as
both). Perhaps relating them all to some 4D framework is the answer
here, and if such relation can be done without breaking the individual
ontologies with their different timescale-based ontological commitments,
that would be good. (012)
Similarly there are different ontological commitments likely for
different applications in the distinction between concrete and abstract.
Most people would regard only things you can weigh and kick as concrete,
but for example I have chosen to define financial securities as concrete
things whether or not they are in material form - a partition that
artificially separates similar financial securities based on whether or
not they are made of paper would not be useful IMHO. (013)
However certain abstract things are clearly abstact no matter how you
look at them. In business terms, things like goals and strategies would
be abstract but necessary (an Actor pursues some Goal in carrying out
some Activity). Here I think the approach you have developed in COSMO
could make a good foundation for certain classes of Abstract Thing that
are also relevant to businesses. Perhaps the labels you use at the top
of that particular part of the model would be more useful and meaningful
than saying "Abstract". (014)
> Roles, for example, can cut
> across several disjoint categories. (015)
I don't get that. I understand that in setting out to create an ontology
from scratch, one can more or less decide whether it's more appropriate
to define a role as a thing or a relationship. To me it makes sense to
have a second order thing (Actor and/or Party - I use both as they have
distinct and useful meanings), and to have a "role" relationship to that
second order thing. You end up with more different terms than perhaps
one database or applicaiton would need, but you can (hopefully) relate
it to a full range of data models without it falling over. See for
example securities issuers, Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) that are the
issuers of certain types of collateralized debt obligation and so on - a
difficult mess to unpick but I think that separating roles and relative
things gives a rich enough vocabulary to start to unpick it. (016)
This is also where I find it helpful to define a "most general" set of
classes and relations, such that every Activity has an Actor who has a
Role, with all roles being specialised meanings derived from that most
general archetype of a role. So the role of "manages project" is a
specialised variant of the concept of Role, as applied to the Actor
which is Project Manager. (017)
In terms of that I really don't understand what you mean about roles
cutting across several disjoint categories. (018)
> If you have some specific logical properties that you think should be
> assigned to those top-level categories, send me a note and I will be happy
> to see how they can be related to the COSMO elements.
>
The thing about high level categories is that I would not expect to see
them have many logical properties, otherwise I would suspect that there
was a thing above them in the taxonomy that did not have those properties. (019)
Relative Thing has an identity which is an Independent Thing, and a
context which is the Mediating Thing. (020)
Occurrent Thing - I've defined Event as a sub-class of this, and it is
something that has a time and a place (incidentally some ontologies e.g
INDECS call this a "context". I was reluctant to assign these specific
properties to Occurrent Thing itself, so it has no properties, but I'm
open to wiser consel on this one. After all, a process is also a kind of
Occurrent Thing, but it is not a kind of Event, I think. Likewise a
State is certainly not a kind of Event but it belongs in the Occurrent
partition. (021)
> There is a lot of work already done in the OpenCyc, SUMO, DOLCE, BFO,
> ISO15926, and other ontologies that can serve as a starting point if one
> wants to redo the top-level categories. Seeing how these can be related to
> each other is quite educational.
>
>
Indeed there is. My first impression was that the Cyc / SUMO etc. views
went too quickly into domain specific partitions. I realise that the
reasons have been well explained here and I need to spend more time
looking at this, but I still think that certain concepts - specifically
legal, financial, business (transactions etc. as per REA) and so on are
relevant to every business (but perhaps not to every building, every
organic molecule etc.) and there is I believe a real case for some
common terms in the business world. The terms one would need should
mostly be available in standards by now, if not in ontologies. (022)
However I am also hesitant to use any ontology where the classes cannot
be traced directly back to some real industry standard, since although
those may not (yet) be ontologies for the most part, they should have
figured out all the meaningful concepts that are useful in their various
domains of discourse. (023)
Best regards, (024)
Mike
> Pat
>
> Patrick Cassidy
> MICRA, Inc.
> 908-561-3416
> cell: 908-565-4053
> cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
>
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> (025)
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