On Oct 26, 2009, at 11:43 AM, Ian Bailey wrote:
> Er...what does ontology have to do with automated reasoning ? (01)
Ever since the term was co-opted (not entirely without warrant) by the
CS/AI community, a (perhaps the) central motivation has been to
facilitate automated reasoning on large knowledge bases. (02)
> The scope of ontology is far wider than that, and there are lots of
> ontologies out there that are really useful for real world
> applications, but don't meet the narrow requirements for finite-time
> reasoning. (03)
Example being...? Do you really mean it's in a logic without a proof
theory? Or do you simply mean that the ontology is not formally
specified? I don't doubt that a semi-formal ontology couldn't be
useful for, e.g., facilitating a common understanding of a domain
among human agents. But, ultimately, complete clarity (and
computational support) comes only when an informal ontology has been
rendered in a logical language. And if you've got a genuine logical
language, you'll have some sort of proof theory and hence something
amenable to automated reasoning. (04)
> On the other hand, there are ontologies out there that have been
> built only for reasoning, and are no use whatsoever in real world
> applications...in fact there are rather a lot of these, mostly
> funded by our taxes, unfortunately. (05)
So there are bad, well-funded ontologies; nothing new there. (06)
> I'm not sure a complete proof theory is required either. (07)
You are right; partial proof theories for well-specified fragments of
a given logic could also be useful. The point was that one needs a
rigorous proof theory for a logic to support any kind of automated
reasoning. (08)
> The none-well-founded stuff seems to work quite well (assuming
> that's what Chris meant by "proof"). (09)
I don't have any clear idea what you have in mind by "none-well-
founded" stuff. I'm guessing you mean "non-well-founded" but I'm
still not sure what you mean. Perhaps you are alluding to well-
founded semantics (WFS)? That is indeed a framework that in general
does not have a complete proof theory but there are a number of
interesting completeness results for WFS-based systems when certain
conditions are imposed on models. (010)
-chris (011)
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