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Hi Adrian,
That is where I agree with you too.I mhave been
trying to visualize the condition where objects, properties and relations change
theri character and they become one of the other two as a result of mental
operations.
But i am not going to go through that again, as
nobody was interested before. So jsut a few examples
One of these operations is abstraction
that helps you see the properties of an object and
create a list of such properties.
Then by taking one of those properties as an
OBJECT, you can go on to define another set of properties.
(Do not think that a Rubik's cube just a passtime
without any logic or reaqson)
Ferenc
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 6:35
PM
Subject: Re:
[ontolog-forum]Ontologiesassocialmediators(was:Ontologydevelopment
method)
Hi Ed,
You wrote
...A concept is defined
by reference to its properties or by reference to its
instances. In
many cases, the reference to instances is exemplary, and
intended to be
inductive. Precisely because these lists (properties and
instances)
are open and grow with experience, the process is clumsy and
does not
always produce "perfect" alignment of the concepts.
There's
actually another way to define a concept, one that to some extent bridges the
person-machine gap. You can define a concept in terms of other
concepts. For example:
we need to reduce projected world yearly emissions of CO2 by some-number million metric tons per year by 2025
increasing some-activity by some-amount percent would reduce world CO2 emissions by 1 million Metric Tons/yr
multiplying that-number by that-amount and rounding to 1 place gives some-quantity
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
increasing only that-activity by that-quantity percent by 2025 would meet world 2005 CO2 emission requirements
In the example, the concept expressed by the last line is defined in
terms of the concepts in the first three lines.
So, one might ask, is
there infinite regress here? Actually no, because one can ground a
concept of this form by using it as a heading for a table of data
[1,2].
-- Adrian
[1] www.reengineeringllc.com/demo_agents/CarbonDioxideEmissons1.agent
[2]
www.reengineeringllc.com/A_Wiki_for_Business_Rules_in_Open_Vocabulary_Executable_English.pdf
On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Ed Barkmeyer <edbark@xxxxxxxx>
wrote:
FERENC KOVACS wrote:
> In order to be able
to agree on any piece of knowledge we must establish the identity of the
subject of discourse and align our own concepts against each
other.
>
Yes. But we cannot expect such alignment to be
perfect in any sense.
> Such an alignment is not possible by using
object, properties and relations and events as identifiers. Even if we agree
that a concept is an objectand an object is a totality of propeerties and a
list of real life items displaying/materialising those properties (usually
also used as examples). These lists must be open as they grow with the
advance of learning.
>
And yet, this is exactly how people have
always succeeded in
communicating concepts, and assigning shared
terminology. A concept is
defined by reference to its properties or
by reference to its
instances. In many cases, the reference to
instances is exemplary, and
intended to be inductive. Precisely
because these lists (properties and
instances) are open and grow with
experience, the process is clumsy and
does not always produce "perfect"
alignment of the concepts.
But like human communication, no claim is
made that ontologies produce
perfect alignment of the intent, either.
What is critical is that it
produces practical alignment -- the
term serves the purpose of the
interpersonal communication; the ontology
is reliable with respect to
the properties cited.
> Because
the process of increasing our knowledge is not recorded, the path is
important for the individual and the community.
This is true.
That is, the concept that any person has, or any
community shares,
is formed by experience, and will reflect that
experience to some extent.
And the varying ability of humans to
abstract and analogize means
that different individuals may acquire
different concepts from the same
experience.
["Some people can learn from the mistakes of others; some
can learn only
from their own mistakes; and some don't seem to learn from
either." --
Mark Twain]
> resolution rather than
controversion is required.
That is simply not true. Both are
required. We learn from comparison
and discrimination, but also
from counterexamples and false analogies.
"All that glitters is not
gold."
> But from the very beginning of schooling we pass on
knowledge in school subject frames without harmonizing definitions or
cross-referencing.
Yes, but no one's education stops there. At
some time, commonly
supposed to be around age 12, children become capable
of critical
thinking. And thereafter, in some curricula, we try to
teach them the
skills of argument, comparision, unification, etc., in the
hope that
this will lead them to harmonization and cross-reference.
But those are
skills and they depend in part on individual talent.
Just as no amount
of coaching can make an average striker "bend it
like Beckham", no
amount of teaching can create an Einstein.
>
Today you have concordance programs and it would be a simple job to find out
any inconsistencies in usage, adpect or approach.
>
I hope no
one believes this. The equivalence of the concepts in the
heads of
two authors is unknowable. Some level of practical equivalence
may
be gleaned from their writing.
This is also where the problem of the
culture of speech communities
enters in. A frequent phenomenon in
government and large corporations
is management writing that is intended
for upper management and is
confusing or contradictory for the people
actually doing the work. The
communities use the same catch phrases
for the same subject matter, but
they are used at different levels of
abstraction and with different
intent. A concordance, however,
would likely identify them as having
the same meaning, because the
environmental terminology matches, by
(intentionally) having the same
kind of differences in interpretation.
Think of "Service-oriented
architecture".
> Therefore the representation of knowledge should
not be static as in abstract networks, but dynamic, thus procedural, which
means that time and space must be included in an ontology together
with verbs that represent realtions at a better detail (for the sake of
identification) than the current relations you know well enough are
insufficient.
>
I may be missing Ferenc's point
here.
This may be an argument for what should be in a physical
ontology, but,
to follow an earlier line, I cannot imagine how to apply
spatial notions
to most concepts in linguistics or psychology or even the
famous
oenology ontology. And the application of temporal notions
to those
fields reflects specific dynamics that are concepts in those
fields,
such as "phonological/consonantal drift" and "aging".
Dynamic
properties are just properties. Concepts are
verb-like and noun-like
and modifier-like; some of the verb-like concepts
are "dynamic" in
nature. "procedural" is an even narrower
concept.
The dynamic behavior of a body of knowledge is a different
concern from
"dynamic concepts". As Ferenc says, the sum of all
human knowledge is
constantly growing. The question is: How
does that relate to knowledge
engineering?
The representation of
knowledge in any captured form, including
ontologies, is by definition
static. It only changes by replacement.
Its longevity and value is
dependent on the breadth of experience that
was represented in the
encoded knowledge itself, and the relative rate
of evolution and
revolution of all knowledge in that domain. Isaac
Newton's physics
was accepted for 225 years; Noam Chomsky's linguistics
was accepted for
about 30. And both are still respected, but they are
now understood
as being valid only for a certain set of uses and in
certain views.
Nothing we do about knowledge engineering as we
understand it can
change this. When there is more knowledge in an area,
some elements
of some commonly used texts and ontologies will be
obsolete and perhaps
invalid, or like Newtonian physics, no longer valid
for all uses, but
still valid for many of the same old kinds of uses,
including most new
instances of them.
-Ed
--
Edward J. Barkmeyer
Email:
edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute
of Standards & Technology
Manufacturing Systems Integration
Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263
Tel: +1 301-975-3528
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263
FAX: +1
301-975-4694
"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus
of NIST,
and have not been reviewed by any Government
authority."
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