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----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 6:59
AM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Fw: Context
in a sentence
Dear Pat,
Ali: I will only note that a functioning family of interlingua ontologies
- a collection, perhaps situated within a repository would suffice for almost
all purposes of intercommunication. It makes the question of producing a
single foundation ontology somewhat superfluous, with quickly diminishing
returns on value.
Ali: "When appropriate linkages between existing ontologies can already
be developed using emerging tools and techniques, the added value derived from
putting in all that effort to produce a single foundational ontology seems
less than clear.
Ali
On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 8:31 PM, Patrick Cassidy <pat@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Ali,
Thanks for your
comments, I suspect they represent what some others are also
thinking.
A response to a few
points that were perhaps not clear enough:
[AH]
>> 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.
[PC] Well,
as I said the analogy may mislead. I do not think that English is
analogous to an FO – I do think that the set of concepts represented by the
**defining vocabulary** (2148 words of English) used in Longman’s is
analogous to the concept representations of an FO; because of ambiguity, Guo
estimated that the number of different senses used in the definitions was
close to 4000. English is not analogous to RDF: perhaps the
**grammar** of English is analogous, but the grammar ***plus*** the basic
vocabulary of 2148 words is what I consider analogous to the FO. But
if this still seems wrong, let us both forget it. The technology of an
FO can be discussed on its own terms.
[AH] 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
[PC] I am aware of several projects that aim to integrate
multiple ontologies in some form, including the SUO and IEEE project in
which I participated, but am not aware of any that have adopted the tactic
of agreeing on the most primitive ontology elements and using those as a set
of building blocks with which to construct the meanings of all the other
ontology elements. I may have missed such a project, and if you
have a specific reference to a project that has adopted that tactic, I would
much appreciate the pointer.
[AH] >> 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.
[PC] Well, that is not guaranteed, but as I mentioned,
where there appear to be logical inconsistencies, the tactic is to try to
logically represent the inconsistent theories using some common set of
primitives, and then the inconsistent theories themselves will not be part
of the ontological commitment of the FO, but will be described by the FO in
some extension. We don’t know for certain whether there will be
irreconcilable differences so large that it prevents a large community of
users from agreeing an **any** FO. But after years of inquiring, I
still haven’t seen any examples of different theories that cannot be
described by some common set of elements. If such theories exist, that
may mean that there will be some ontologists that cannot use the common FO
(I mentioned that possibility). But we already know that it is likely
that for various reasons, there will be at least some groups that don’t want
to use the FO. No problem, the FO is only for those groups who
consider it *important* to interoperate accurately. All we need
is a large enough group so that third-party developers of utilities and
applications will make using the FO desirable for ever larger numbers of
people. A user base much smaller than the whole world will be quite
adequate. The important thing is to get ***some*** widely used FO so
that (a) we can test its functionality; and (b) those who want their domain
ontologies to be as compatible as possible with many other ontologies will
have a well-tested way to achieve that.. As of now we have none.
[AH]
>> 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.
[PC] Yes,
there are other tactics to create some kind of interoperability, but (a) as
you mentioned, the slow accumulation of agreements is ***very*** slow (we’ve
been discussing ontology mapping and integration for 15 years); (b) there is
no guarantee that anything particularly useful will come of that tactic
either; and (c) either the mappings are semiautomatic and extremely costly
or they are automatic and very inaccurate. My emphasis has been
on **accurate** general semantic interoperability that can support automated
inference allowing computers to make mission-critical decisions without
human intervention. I have what I consider to be good reasons to
believe that that is simply **not possible** without a common ontology – and
the use by all parties of a common foundation ontology as the inventory of
basic concept representations that can be combined to create the complex
domain ontology elements *does* provide an automated integration
mechanism that can create in effect a merged common ontology from different
communicating ontologies, by sharing the local ontology element structures
that describe the communicated information but are not in the basic
FO. All ontologies that can interpret the basic FO elements properly
will be able to interpret the constructed domain elements – all being
interpreted in the same way for each communicating ontology.
[AH]
>> 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.
[PC] That
is precisely what phase 1 of the project would do, by getting many different
groups to find what basic ontology they can all (or most of them) use in
common. But instead of taking another 15 or 150 years it could be done
in a few years with a coordinated project.
We can
continue to let a thousand flowers bloom on their own, but though they may
be individually pretty, they won’t talk to each other.
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.
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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