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Ali wrote: "...I would love to see an issue of an ontology journal,
say Applied Ontology, devoted to cataloging who is doing what, what the major
perspectives in ontology are, and what the major contributions from various
research groups across the world are. Instead of a review paper, a review
_journal_ of where we are, who we are and what
we've done. I think such an effort would go much further in fostering
the requisite cohesion than trying to derive consensus first."
Good idea, Ali. To realize, it is easier to organize a new journal, say,
the Journal of Ontology, Semantics and Computation.
Something what Aurona Gerber from South Africa has done: The Journal
of Information Systems Knowledge and Ontologies (JISKO), covering an interesting
range of topics:
* Knowledge in the Information Society * Knowledge and Ontologies in
Information Systems * Ontologies and Ontology * Information Systems
Knowledge Management and Engineering * Enterprise Knowledge Management and
Engineering * All aspects in Ontology Construction, Engineering,
Modelling, Learning, Population and Evaluation * All aspects Ontology
Evolution and Maintenance * All aspects in Ontology Adoption, Evaluation and
Management * Ontology Languages * Ontology Use in Information Systems *
Ontology Coupling, Integration and Matching * Semantic Web Applications http://www.ibimapublishing.com/journals/JISKO/jisko.html
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 12:11
AM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Fw: Context
in a sentence
Dear Patrick,
Thanks for this email.
A couple of points here, comments below.
On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 4:28 PM, Patrick Cassidy <pat@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[PC] I never
said that, and I don’t believe it either. But regardless of how one
chooses to talk about the world, any two communicating agents must talk
about it **in the same language**, or else fail to communicate
accurately
....
[PC] Not
necessarily, though see the next paragraph. I am sure that different
people do have different fundamental assumptions and different beliefs, and
use words in different ways, and all of that creates a great risk of faulty
communication, as one can observe in many situations such as this
forum. In fact, it is probably impossible to people to have
**exactly** the same internal states, though with effort we can get close
enough to each other for communication accurate enough for most practical
purposes (a least when they are not trying to score debating
points). But computers **can** have identical sets of theories
(the computer version of beliefs), since the computer owners are in complete
control and only have to choose to use the same set of theories in order to
communicate accurately. My point was that since we do have control
over our computers’ theories, we can get them to communicate accurately by
using the same sets of theories. That doesn’t mean that there is only
**one** true set of theories, it does mean that any group that agrees that
**some** particular set of theories is adequate to express what they want
their computers to communicate can use that set to enable accurate computer
communication. If there are some who feel that the theories are not
adequate for their purposes, they can choose not to communicate accurately
with the community that does use the common language – or make some
adjustments to get an approximate interpretation – or better yet, try
to collaborate with the others to find some set of theories that includes
their needs as well. But once there is **some** community that
uses a common foundation ontology as the basis for accurate computer
communication among useful programs, it is likely that one such foundation
ontology will be the most commonly used, and therefore will provide the
greatest audience. If a different foundation ontology is used in some
specialized community, it can become the preferred basis for communication
there, but that community will then not communicate accurately with the
other, larger audience. I expect that one common foundation ontology
will eventually dominate the computer communication media for the same
reason that English dominates in international scientific conferences – it
gives the greatest value per unit effort expended. That situation may
not last forever – English may be replaced by, say Chinese . . . that
depends on unpredictable factors.
I'm very glad you acknowledge that it is probably impossible for people
to have exactly the same internal states, let alone descriptions of what is.
As you note in the first comment above, all that is really required for two
agents to communicate is to agree on what they're communicating
about.
However, I'm not sure I accept your analogy that English == Common
Theory. For me the analogy is more along the lines of English == Common Logic
or RDF or OWL2 and the descriptions _using_ English are the
actual ontologies we're speaking of - i.e. the words used in English, say the
vocabulary V == ontology O. To me this is a more apt analogy.
The solution your post above seems to suggest is actually very similar to
the interlingua ontology idea developed in the late 90's, though perhaps that
idea was too soon given the state of ontology development. It has since been
significantly updated, altered and revived in the form of the OOR or COLORE
projects.
As you have noted, the way for two agents to communicate effectively is
via determining where they agree and disagree on their theory (the application
of English to describe a particular domain / system etc.)
Moreover, as you note below, the number of primitives seems to taper much
like y = log (x). However, this doesn't mean that those set of primitives are
consistent with one another. And there's the rub.
As it stands we have many people who are working to develop this
interlingua; we are in effect, defacto developing exactly the set of
primitives you speak of, except in a not very coordinated manner and without
an overarching framework. While this lack of cohesion introduces some
problems, it also means work can progress without waiting for consensus.
Coincidentally, tools are developed, released and implemented to address
exactly those problems that arise from said lack of cohesion - notably efforts
in semantic mappings.
Thus, while we might not have all agreed on the common set of primitives,
we're slowly understanding where my primitives agree with yours and where they
disagree and in what ways. Unsurprisingly, this is also enabling my ontology
to be able to communicate effectively with your ontology in much the way you
described above.
Alas, this is slow going, and it can sometimes be frustrating that there
is no overarching cohesion, but then we have wonderful communities like
ontolog who are linking people together and providing a platform such as the
OOR to collate, collect and hopefully, ultimately connect all these different
primitives.
The above said, to me, a better allocation of resources, instead of a
trying to achieve broad consensus from the get go, would be to analyze what
currently exist, figure out what the primitives being used might be, and
figure out the links, kinks and winks between them - i.e. it might be more
useful to try to derive cohesion from these disparate efforts by digging in
and fleshing things out. An idea i'd floated before to Nicola Guarino and
Michael Gruninger, but I unfortunately haven't pursued with the requisite
vigor - is that I would love to see an issue of an ontology journal, say
Applied Ontology, devoted to cataloging who is doing what, what the major
perspectives in ontology are, and what the major contributions from various
research groups across the world are. Instead of a review paper, a review
_journal_ of where we are, who we are and
what we've done. I think such an effort would go much further in
fostering the requisite cohesion than trying to derive consensus first.
So, while I believe your proposal is valuable, I'm not sure it'll be able
to attract the requisite momentum; not to mention, there seems to be a lot of
work being currently done which already parallels what you envision.
All the best,
Ali
Patrick,
I suspect that the claim "we need a
common foundational ontology" is exactly equivalent to David's quotation
"(1) the entire meaning of a message is
self-contained in said message", since if we have a common foundational
ontology we should be able to make statements in the ontology that are true
irrespective of context.
I would
interpret C.S.Peirce's definition as saying that communication happens when
an agent sends symbol A and it invokes a knowledge based procedure leading
to symbol B in a second agent, and both A and B refer to the same (concept)
C.
Caveat - I do
not claim that this is Peirce's interpretation, or even that he would agree
with it, but its my B to his A.
The point
being is that context (what ever that is) defines the inference task in
which A is used to invoke B. Even on the Semantic Web, the context that it
is the semantic web defines particular processing protocols which invoke a
system that understands OWL or RDF rather than one that only understands
HTML or even EDIFACT.
However, more
broadly, I would reject the idea that there is only one way to talk about
the world. In this context, I would say there are in fact two distinct types
of ontolology, those that talk about the world, and those that model the
world, and that these two views of ontology are incompatible. (A foundation
ontology is a model of the world). Perhaps, following Protégé, we could
distinguish them by having as TOP "word" and "thing".
This is not to
say that I don't think common ontologies are a bad idea - they are essential
for engineered applications - or rather, applications engineered to match a
particular human or business context. However, they are not a universal
panacea simply because different contexts will be understood through
different ontologies.
One might
propose that, because we are all the same type of creature (human) that we
must therefore all use the same mechanisms for thought, and this must lead
to the same foundational concepts. This would imply firstly, that the
variation in humans is too small to allow for different mechanisms for
thought, and secondly, that the mechanisms of thought are entirely
conditioned by our genetic inheritance and are not affected by environment.
Both questions should be scientifically verifiable, and indeed may already
have been determined, however, this is not my area of expertise, although I
would strongly suspect both hypotheses to be false.
So, no context
free language, no common foundational ontologies.
Sean Barker
Bristol
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Patrick Cassidy
Sent: 26 January 2010 05:52
To:
'[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Context in a
sentence *** WARNING *** This message has originated outside your organisation, either from an external partner or the Global Internet. Keep this in mind if you answer this message.
David,
>>
I want something--MT? Ontology support?--that can read Fortran,
Jovial, COBOL. Java, PHP, Ruby, C, etc. (oops... that's a computer language)
documents & make (more) sense out of said documents. These are
textual artifacts (therefore "documents"?) which may or may not be written
by humans, they're decidedly NOT edited for readability, and they are really
not intended for human consumption.
I believe
that current ontology technology, or extensions of it (to include
procedural attachments) has the technical capability to do such
things. But non-trivial applications will be quite labor-intensive to
implement.
As I see
it, ontology technology is still in its infancy – or perhaps still
embryonic. I have had great difficulty finding any publicly
inspectable (open source) applications that go much beyond an advanced
version of database information retrieval – adding in a little logical
inference, but not using that inference to do anything conspicuously more
impressive than RDB’s themselves. CYC suggests it has built
applications that do that, but we do not have them available for public
testing – and much of CYC is still proprietary, a big turn-off for those who
need a language that can be used freely.
John Sowa
has told us that he uses a combination of techniques to solve knotty
problems efficiently. I believe that is what will be very
effective in general, but for that to work outside the confines of a single
group – i.e. to enable multiple separately developed agents to cooperate in
solving a problem- they will also need a common language to accurately
communicate information.
The
problem, as I perceive it is that, although up to now there has been great
progress in understanding the science (mathematical properties) of inference
– for which we can be grateful to the mathematicians and logicians -
understanding inference only provides a **grammar** and a
minimal basic **semantics** for a language that computers can
understand. What we have very little agreement on is the
**vocabulary**, without which there is no useful language. For
computers to properly interpret each other’s data, it is necessary to have a
common vocabulary – or vocabularies that can be **accurately**
translated. Such a translation mechanism is possible if a common
foundation ontology were adopted, which would have representations of all
the fundamental concepts necessary to logically describe the domain concepts
of the ontologies in programs that need to communicate data. It
is a measure of the pre-scientific nature of the field that there is
actually even disagreement about the need for a common foundation
ontology. To me it is blindingly obvious – one cannot communicate
without a common language (including vocabulary); there are no
exceptions. But most efforts at interoperability among separately
developed ontologies currently focus on developing mappings in some
automated manner – which any inspection immediately reveals cannot be done
with enough accuracy to allow machines to make mission-critical decisions
based on such inaccurate mappings. Accurate mappings are possible via
a common foundation ontology. But for reasons that I believe are not
based on relevant technical considerations, there is little enthusiasm for
developing such an ontology at present. Past efforts have failed,
because they depended on voluntary commitment of a great deal of time from
participants in order to find common ground among a large enough user
community. What will work is if a large developing community is
**paid** to build and test a common foundation ontology and demonstrate its
capability for broad general semantic interoperability. I am certain
it will happen sometime that such an ontology will be developed, because the
need for it and benefits of it are so compelling. The only question
for me is how much time and money will be wasted before such a widely used
foundation ontology is developed and tested in multiple applications – and
who will pay for it.
So, I
believe that current ontology technology provides the basis to tackle the
problems you cite, but I don’t know of any off-the-shelf programs that can
do that now. Perhaps someone has developed one?
Pat
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