I would have thought Agreement was a legal thing, along with
jurisdiction, law and so on. Whether one calls it upper, mid or whatever. (01)
There are I agree much more general things - the framework. And maybe a
very general concept of agreement (with no legal standing) belongs
there, that's a good point. It's a question of where you draw the boundary. (02)
A simple test I think is whether you have something that has no
properties to speak of, or at least the basic minimum that are possible
(an agreement must have more than one party for example). These, once
worked out, would be something that the "top" of an individual industry
vertical ontology would be linked to, rather than directly to "Thing"
(what I call the Pizza approach, whereby the pizza tutorial example has
Pizza, Topping and Base all directly as child classes of "Thing"). (03)
A good ontology development method would recognise the existence or
potential existence of good, standardized terms within some established
framework, and also would direct the modeler to find and link to common
terms from the legal, numerical, geographical etc. standards as well. (04)
Mike (05)
Matthew West wrote:
> Dear Mike,
>
>
>> I would hesitate before bundling law off into its own domain. It's a
>> good example of one of those so called "domains" the concepts of which
>> are actually fundamental across a range of business domains. For
>> instance any business would reference concepts from the legal domain -
>> essentially law is where most of the meaning comes from in business
>> (the
>> AI folks have some interesting things to say about symbol grounding and
>> courts of law).
>>
>
> MW: Being (what I think of) as upper ontology is not about how important
> something is, but some key properties it needs to have. Those properties are
> that it needs to embody some ontological commitment, or be utterly
> unavoidable (like whole-part, classification, specialization).
>
> Now law is important, but the ontological commitment comes at the level of
> intentional objects, so I would have law at the next level down from there.
>
>
>> I do think that some of us may still be talking slightly at cross
>> purposes about what's an Upper Ontology, what's a framework for
>> integrating ontologies, whether one of necessity has to be the other
>> and
>> so on. Meanwhile there are things which some people call "Domain" which
>> are fundamental enough to be used by multiple domains; particularly
>> law,
>> financial accounting and economic activity.
>>
>
> [MW] Absolutely. When we were developing Shell's Downstream Data Model we
> had a number of levels of abstraction. So subject areas like agreements,
> organization and location were relatively high up because they were used by
> so many others, but not actually at the top.
>
>> If you bundle these into a vertical domain where no-one else sees them,
>> then you will have ontologies in other domains which replicate existing
>> terms (or bypass them in their taxonomic hierarchy) without knowing
>> they
>> are there. That would be like someone discovering a new species of
>> reptile but not knowing what a reptile was because that part of the
>> taxonomy of species was hidden away in someone else's specialized
>> vertical domain of African or Australasian creatures.
>>
>
> [MW] Indeed, and I don't think of domains as being vertical. Most domains
> rely on other domains for some things in my experience, and as I said above,
> there seem to be layers.
>
> Regards
>
> Matthew West
> Information Junction
> Tel: +44 560 302 3685
> Mobile: +44 750 3385279
> matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.informationjunction.co.uk/
> http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/
>
> This email originates from Information Junction Ltd. Registered in England
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>
>
>
>
>> Mike
>>
>> Matthew West wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Pat,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> Just on one point:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> [MW] Yes, but I repeat what I said to John. Those things that are
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> truly
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> foundational are unavoidable in practically any domain, and are in
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> any
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> case quite small.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> Yes, I suspect the same.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> I rather think the mileage is in filtering out domains and
>>>>> parts of domains that are not of interest to the problem at hand.
>>>>>
>> But
>>
>>>>> maybe we have slightly different ideas of what an upper ontology/
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> foundation
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> ontology is.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> Probably true. In representing the concepts in the Longman defining
>>>> vocabulary, most of the effort goes into specifying social concepts,
>>>> which
>>>> would not be needed in most industrial applications. They get more
>>>> useful
>>>> for things like law.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> [MW] Well contracts and agreements and organizations are found in
>>>
>> industry
>>
>>> as well, but generally not criminal law.
>>>
>>> I would expect to find a basic ontology of intentionally constructed
>>>
>> objects
>>
>>> in an upper ontology, but I would see law itself as a domain and
>>>
>> possibly
>>
>>> many other social concepts as domains, just as engineering is.
>>>
>>> Regards
>>>
>>> Matthew West
>>> Information Junction
>>> Tel: +44 560 302 3685
>>> Mobile: +44 750 3385279
>>> matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>> http://www.informationjunction.co.uk/
>>> http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/
>>>
>>> This email originates from Information Junction Ltd. Registered in
>>>
>> England
>>
>>> and Wales No. 6632177.
>>> Registered office: 2 Brookside, Meadow Way, Letchworth Garden City,
>>> Hertfordshire, SG6 3JE.
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>> --
>> Mike Bennett
>> Director
>> Hypercube Ltd.
>> 89 Worship Street
>> London EC2A 2BF
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> (06)
--
Mike Bennett
Director
Hypercube Ltd.
89 Worship Street
London EC2A 2BF
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www.hypercube.co.uk
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