A couple of clarifications: (01)
[JS] >
> What I was trying to say is that terms specified by imagery are family
> resemblance terms that cannot be defined by necessary and sufficient
> conditions.
Agreed - they cannot be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions, and
I have never said and have tried hard to avoid implying that they are. Or
at least most cannot - I am agnostic as to whether some might be represented
in terms of more basic visual primitives. Many ontology elements will be
specified only by necessary conditions, including criteria for exclusion
from a class. The linguistic description will fill in some of the
understanding (for programmers) that the logic cannot supply, especially by
pointing to known instances. This will still leave open some potential for
varying use, so absolute accuracy is not guaranteed. But this system will,
as best I can tell, enable a broad semantic interoperability (not mappings
constructed for specific cases) more accurate than any other I have see
proposed. I have never used the term "necessary and sufficient conditions"
and have avoided the term "definition" except for dictionary definitions, so
as to avoid giving a misleading impression of the nature of the logical
descriptions (or specifications). (02)
> MW> Yes. But for interoperability (Pat's interest) that is not
> a problem. You only need to pick one. You then only need to be able to
map other views into and out of it. Alternatively, if you want to capture
many different viewpoints, you can adopt John's Lattice of Theories. (03)
[JS] I agree with Matthew's point, but I suspect that those alternatives are
not the ones Pat was proposing. The first one, as I interpret it, adopts a
fixed ontology and legislates it for a specific group of applications. Any
application that is added to the group must have some mapping to that
ontology. I agree that alternative can be valuable for a specific range of
applications. (04)
Well, I was in fact proposing that different viewpoints can be captured in
an FO - if they are logically compatible and translatable, they can all be
in the FO, but if logically incompatible they would be in extensions (which,
though not technically part of the FO itself, would be maintained in the
same site so as to avoid others having to recreate the same ontologies
again), which would form a lattice (or at least a hierarchy) of theories
" legislates" is a loaded word. The FO and the community that use it
would provide an interoperable community that others may or may not
*voluntarily* want to interoperate with. If not, they can ignore the FO, or
create an isolated community using some other interoperability mechanism. (05)
[JS] I believe that Pat's primitives are the 2000+ words in Longman's list.
But more important than the list would be examples of how they could be used
for any useful application. (06)
I have tried to carefully distinguish between human language and ontology,
but I use the Longman experience as an *analogy* to what can be done with
logic. The words in the Longman list are not the primitives, the logical
concepts that are referenced by uses in the Longman definitions (there can
be more than one per word) are the starting set of presumptive primitives.
(Actually Guo has shown that some of the 2148 words can themselves be
defined by a smaller set) I take the concepts referenced by the LDV as a
good start, but they may not be enough. There are among other things some
abstract ontology elements that are not lexicalized in English, and many
relations that are not labeled by single words. Rules specifying the
meanings of the relations are part of the logical specifications of elements
in the FO and are not represented by individual words. (07)
Pat (08)
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx (09)
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