"Database data models are sometimes referred to
as ontologies, although ontologies have constraints and inferential rules in
addition to entity relationships. An ontology is one way of structuring
conceptual models into classes, objects and relationships among the objects. An
upper level ontology of concepts has been suggested among the community of
philosophers, logicians and software engineers as an initial ontology for
applications. The IEEE Standard Upper Ontology (SUO) working group applied some
of the world's best logicians, philosophers and linguists to the problem of choosing
at least a small "universal" ontology based on a conceptual
framework. This is one approach to narrowing context, but is not specifically
linguistically based. Ontologies are presently being studied in many areas, but
have not made much commercial progress, perhaps with Cyc as the most well known
example. And even after years of searching, the SUO group was unable to agree
on a suitable top level ontology. One conclusion many SUO members reached was
that no universal ontology exists because the meaning of classes, objects and
relationships constitute subjective experiences on the part of the sending and
receiving agents, and do not represent abstract properties of
reality...Ontologies as actually used by people are empirically developed
through individual experience, rather than abstractions describing reality in
some objective way."
RC> Thank you for focusing so cleanly
on that observation. It seems clear to me. Did I misstate anything,
in anyone’s opinion, in that quote?
That message from SUO was a clear one to
all concerned, I believe, that only subjective theorizing, classifying,
experimenting and observing within a database can recreate a human ontology.
Objective methods are more likely to be used in communications among differing
subjective models – in the mapping from one to another. The problem
of communicating from the point of two different ontologies seems to me to be
the exact central point of this email group’s focus.
What am I missing Azamat, or do I simply
misunderstand your question ?
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com