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Aurona Gerber: "The idea of a review
_journal_ of where we are, who we are and what we've done
is certainly interesting, thank you. I will discuss with my
co-editors."
Dear Aurona,
This idea belongs to the young
brilliant mind of Ali Hashimi, who expressed his commitment to its
realization. I believe, it will make a good content for your stimulating
journal. Also, the best possible contributors and reviewers, you can find among
the members of the Ontolog Forum.
Regards,
Azamat
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 12:39
PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Fw: Context
in a sentence
Dear Azamat
The idea of a review _journal_ of
where we are, who we are and what we've done is certainly
interesting, thank you. I will discuss with my co-editors.
regards
On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 9:54 AM, AzamatAbdoullaev <abdoul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
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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