Sean Barker wrote: >
> I would like to reject the idea that the formalization of a lower level
> ontology implies the existence of an upper level ontology (01)
I agree that no *explicit* upper ontology is needed *if* we can rely on
the users all interpreting the information in the same way. For any given
community that has some tradition of interpretation of specific terms, that
will usually be the case. In that case no ontology at all may be needed,
and a few fields in a form may be enough to convey the information one
wants. A foundation ontology is needed when one cannot rely on local
conventions to distinguish among alternative interpretations of a term. Even
terms in a local domain ontology can be ambiguous. The implicit upper
ontology that Matthew refers to is the set of understandings that allow
people to use transferred information correctly, even when alternative
interpretations are possible. (02)
But can we rely on machines having similar understandings? It is very
important to distinguish the problem one is trying to solve to decide what
the solution is. Many people in this forum have commented on how certain
problems have been solved without an explicit upper ontology. Yes, that has
been done and will be done forever. But when information is being
communicated among multiple communities with multiple local understandings,
a more detailed description of the meanings is required because the local
understandings of particular communities do not apply. This is true of
people, and much truer with machines. That task, of general accurate and
automatic interoperability, is the task that a common foundation ontology is
particularly suited to solve. (03)
It may or may not turn out that a common foundation ontology will also
allow the more efficient creation of domain ontologies even for exclusively
local use, because it provides concept representations that have been tested
in multiple domains, and avoids reinventing multiple varieties of untested
wheels. That will depend on how simple the local domain is, and how
effective the utilities are that allow extraction of only those concepts
needed for the local domain. Until we actually have such an ontology with
its broad user base and effective utilities, I don't see how we can predict
whether it would be better than development of local ontologies without such
a tool. But for the task of general automatic and accurate
interoperability, I have not yet a suggestions that comes close to the
effectiveness of a common foundation ontology. (04)
Pat (05)
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx (06)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sean Barker
> Sent: Saturday, June 06, 2009 3:21 AM
> To: Ontolog-Forum-Bounces
> Subject: [ontolog-forum] FW: Guo's word senses and Foundational
> Ontologies
>
> Apologies for being slow to comment on this thread.
>
> I would like to reject the idea that the formalization of a lower level
> ontology
> implies the existence of an upper level ontology. While the designer of
> the lower level ontology will almost certainly use ontology-like
> heuristics, it is more than likely that an attempt to formalise the
> heuristics into an ontology (at least in the sense of a formal set of
> propositions) would be faced by many open questions.
>
> That is, if I create a system which requests user input, I would
> implicitly assume that the user persists from input to input, but from
> that I could not decide whether my user is 3D with some gubbins of
> temporal logic or 4D.
>
> Returning to the question of paradigm shift I suggested last week, and
> relating it to John's
> lattice of ontologies (here apologies for not commenting earlier, I was
> following John's reading list).
>
> Given a transaction involving a set of ontology elements, I may be able
> to infer a subspace of nodes that the transaction is consistent with.
> However, if I have understood what has been said about the lattice, I
> could not in general infer a unique upper ontology, since the set of
> ontology elements available may be consistent with two or more
> incompatible upper levels, but lack the axioms which discriminate the
> upper levels.
>
> While this is obvious with a single transaction, this will remain true
> of many (if not most) partial ontologies, that is, the ontologies of
> most practical systems.
>
> Further, consider the interaction of two systems with different
> ontologies. A transaction between the systems can only make sense if
> there some sort of relation between the two ontologies. Specifically,
> the
> pragmatics of the transaction should (in some sense) lie in the
> intersection between the lattice subspaces generated by the ontology
> elements involved in each of the two ontologies. The practical
> engineering problem is ensuring that any transaction of interest is in
> this intersection. For example, the design approval process restricts
> the types of design that can be passed over to manufacture to those
> things that can be manufactured - we wouldn't, for example, approve a
> Klien Bottle.
>
> I would emphasise that I did not require that there is simply some
> homeomorphism between the subsets of the ontologies involved,
> but also that the pragmatics of those ontologies matched. I
> do not understand most of the questions on a tax return, but in part
> this is because I have no need to invest the effort to understand the
> subclauses of the questions that evidently do not apply to me. Nor even
> do I care to speculate on the upper level ontology of the Inland
> Revenue. However, I am happy providing I don't pay more tax that I am
> required to, and they are happy if I pay all the tax they think I
> should, and we probably don't misunderstand each other enough to make
> it
> worth going any deeper.
>
> Sean Barker
> Bristol, UK
>
>
>
>
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