John,
Your comments seem to be conflating terms with the categories that they
label: (01)
[JB] > a.) One of the weakness of the category concept is that they
> are designed for coverage fo a domain for which the boundary
> may be poorly ascribed or poorly understood. e.g. we have
> seen redefinition of "I.Q" to include spatial and musical
> components.
>
> b.) Next, domain boundaries change across time and new categories
> may need to be added; for those changes the new entities must
> be vetted. This could be done using cluster analysis.
>
The types (categories, classes) in an ontology should be stable and
well-defined logically. The *terms* that are used in languages and
terminologies to refer to those types may vary with community of use or time
of use. The issue of deciding on the meaning of a term is one for a
terminology group or a Natural Language Processing program. Deciding which
categories are useful to represent for practical purposes is the task of the
ontologist (in consultation with anyone who might use the ontology), but
once defined the categories and relations should have a very well-defined
and stable meaning, documented in text for human understanding and specified
logically for machine use. Changes in the basic terms of an ontology may
change the logical meanings more or less subtly, but such changes are to be
avoided if possible, and are in any case quite a different issue from the
variation of usage of terms over time. (02)
How to create a stable basic ontology (I call it a 'Foundation Ontology') is
another issue that we have discussed at length in this forum. (03)
Of course, the set of concepts that a community decides it needs will also
vary over time, but that can be accomplished in many cases by creating new
combinations of already existing concepts, without changing the meanings of
the basic concepts. Whether one wants to identify such newly needed
concepts by cluster analysis or otherwise does not change the stability of
concept representations already in the basic 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 John Bottoms
> Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 11:01 AM
> To: [ontolog-forum]
> Subject: [ontolog-forum] Deriving categories using clustering
> techniques...
>
> My understanding of categories consists of the following:
> (domain == professional discipline or context across time
> or across a number of contributors)
>
> 1. Quantification of an environment can be accomplished
> using categories.
>
> 2. The domain is determined by a boundary and the ideal
> quantification process divides the domain efficiently.
>
> 3. The metric for the effectiveness quantification is the
> coverage of the domain. However, this may also
> include metrics that include more functionally useful
> components such as means.
>
> My question is related to the effective coverage and is, in
> part, derived from the criticism of the DIKW (or any other
> pyramid) of the abstractions of knowledge.
>
> Q: "Should it be possible to replace the existing approach to
> categories with an approach that extracts measured concepts
> from meanings and then performs cluster analysis on those
> concepts"?
>
> Rational:
> a.) One of the weakness of the category concept is that they
> are designed for coverage fo a domain for which the boundary
> may be poorly ascribed or poorly understood. e.g. we have
> seen redefinition of "I.Q" to include spatial and musical
> components.
>
> b.) Next, domain boundaries change across time and new categories
> may need to be added; for those changes the new entities must
> be vetted. This could be done using cluster analysis.
>
> c.) Finally, the redefinition of the process for determining
> categories could be automated and because the process relies
> on a set of meanings rather than a set of categories, it is
> easier to perform vetting on the meanings.
>
> Or, did I misunderstand the concept and uses of categories?
>
> -John Bottoms
> FirstStar
> Concord, MA
> T: 978-505-9878
>
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