I understand the difficulties that PatH describes (below) and agree that
there will be serious issues that have to be resolved in building an FO
satisfactory to some group of developers. But part of the problem is
mitigated by allowing multiple different ways of representing the same
entity in the FO, as long as they are logically compatible and have
translations between them. And for issues such as "part" including the
whole and "proper part", all such distinctions can be accommodated in the
same ontology. The need to refine intuitions and record those distinction
in logically precise form has always been part of the ontology-building
process. Hard work to be sure, but not impossible. (01)
But now there is a new puzzle for me:
[PH] > But back to the main point. The other worry I have about 'intended
> interpretation' is that, even when working alone, one finds that the
> very process of writing the formal axioms sharpens and sometimes
> forces one to modify ones own pre-formal intuitions. Is a thing part
> of itself? Almost everyone unschooled in mathematics or formal
> techniques will say, no. Almost everyone who has been exposed to
> algebra or formalization techniques will say, yes. The change of mind
> is not really a change in ideas, so much as a recognition that
> allowing this limiting case of parthood gives such a cleaner and more
> useful formal description that it is worth putting up with the slight
> linguistic frisson which wants a 'part' to be something, well, smaller
> or less significant than the whole (and wants a subset to be less than
> the whole, and prefers < to =<, and so on.) Insisting upon fixing the
> intended meanings in cases like this is in fact a symptom of bad
> ontology engineering practice, a kind of naive stubbornness that
> refuses to allow useful engineering optimizations. So even apart from
> the fact that we all disagree, and even allowing for the fact that we
> are talking about intentions, I still think Pat C is wrong :-) (02)
I don't get the point here. Of course, we insist on fixing the intended
meanings of "proper part" via logical axioms and distinguish it from the
more general "part" relation, and include both in the ontology (I recall
reading books and papers that do that) - though we allow anyone to call
those ontology relations anything they want when they map the ontology to
their own preferred terminology. Where the process of formalization
demonstrates that there are possible distinctions, any group interested in
that set of concepts has to create the ontology elements that formalize the
distinctions and decide whether any can be left out of the ontology. The
terminology question is only an issue when one maps the ontology to some
vocabulary. What intended meaning am I missing here? (03)
Perhaps the point is that the process of refinement never ends? Then it may
be necessary at some point to add new ontology elements to capture newly
recognized distinctions. This problem reiterates the discussion about what
happens when the FO changes. The goal of stability for the FO makes it
desirable to try to formalize all recognizable distinctions among the FO
elements at the earliest time. If additions are needed, they need to be
tested to make sure that they don't modify the reasoning used in
applications in a way not intended by the application designers, and be
rejected or modified if they do. But is there any alternative
interoperability tactic that can avoid this issue? Just because the FO as
suggested cannot anticipate and forestall all possible problems doesn't mean
that it is not the most accurate method for general interoperability
available to us. At present, it seems that way to me. (04)
PatC (05)
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx (06)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pat Hayes
> Sent: Tuesday, March 02, 2010 2:27 PM
> To: Matthew West
> Cc: [ontolog-forum]
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Foundation ontology, CYC, and Mapping
>
>
> On Mar 2, 2010, at 2:31 AM, Matthew West wrote:
>
> > Dear PatH and PatC,
> >
> > Let me have a go at this.
> >
> >>> The disconnect between PatH's view of "meaning" and mine is that
> >>> he is
> >>> content to believe that the meanings of the elements used in
> >> programs,
> >>> databases, ontologies (e.g. time, distance, physical object, dollar,
> >>> person)
> >>> all change every time we add a new assertion about unicorns, and I
> >>> am not.
> >>
> >> It is not a matter of being content to believe. I am asserting this
> >> AS
> >> A FACT, and you are simply in denial about elementary facts of
> >> semantic theory. Now, of course, you are free to invent an
> >> alternative
> >> semantic theory, one that supports your intuitions about meanings
> >> being fixed when axioms change, but I would like to see that theory
> >> given some reasonably precise flesh before proceeding to discuss
> this
> >> matter very much further.
> >
> > MW: I suspect the real problem here is that you are each looking
> > through
> > opposite ends of the telescope. Let me describe the different views:
> >
> > PatH looks at it from the theory end, and says that when you change
> > an axiom
> > in a theory there is a different set of models that it picks out.
> > Absolutely
> > right. It "means" something different.
> >
> > PatC looks at it from the other end. He has a particular intended
> > interpretation, and his question is: if he changes this axiom does
> > it still
> > pick out his intended interpretation (he doesn't care about any
> > unintended
> > interpretations). If it does, as far as he is concerned it "means"
> > the same
> > thing. Also true.
> >
> > I think there is something to be accommodated from both sides here in
> > practical ontology development
>
> No doubt. In my defense, I will point out that Pat C was (until
> recently) referring to the meaning that the ontology primitives
> *actually have*, not to intentions. Hence my insistence on the point.
>
> As you say, both true. However, I have doubts about the notion of a
> fixed intended interpretation, even if it is only an intention. First,
> it is important to note that this is not (usually) quite the same
> notion of interpretation as is used when we speak about formal
> semantics, what you refer to above as 'models'. It can be, but it is
> unusual for intentions to be that precise. It is rare to find any
> concept on which humans agree about its meaning well enough to
> completely and absolutely rule out every logically possible way to
> distinguish alternatives. I certainly have never come across a single
> example of this. At the very least, there will be areas of doubt,
> areas where people simply have not thought out the consequences of
> their own ideas well enough to come to a decision. Right now, just for
> one example, I am engaged with a colleague trying to develop an
> ontology of images, and we have been debating for several days about
> exactly what counts as an image. If I copy a digital image, have I
> made a new image, or simply a new copy of the *same* image? How exact
> does the copy need to be? (JPEg compression is lossy, for example, so
> some pixels may change, yet we do not usually say that the image has
> changed.) Is part of an image also an image? Is a 'view' of part of
> the actual world, eg when looking out of a window, itself an image, or
> does it only become one when a camera shutter is opened? And so on
> (and on...) Now, anyone who has tried to actually develop an ontology
> in a group of people will recognize this kind of situation
> immediately. Two competent, even skilled, native speakers of the same
> language with a shared culture, etc.., can still disagree, or at least
> find a lot to discuss, when they have to capture their 'intended'
> meanings in a formal framework. And the final result does not exactly
> conform to either of their intentions: it is a compromise. Neither of
> us are wholly comfortable with the final result. If it were up to us,
> alone, we would have done it our way, and there would have been two
> ontologies. And this is just two people, and indeed two people who
> know one another well and are about as motivated as two people can be
> to want to agree and for their joint project to succeed. Longman's
> dictionary isn't going to be any help for us. We have consulted every
> authority we can find: existing ontologies, the Getty vocabularies,
> the Jago vocabularies in DBPedia, the press standards used for
> describing news images, EXIF, the Umbel distillation of Cyc, thesauri
> developed for museum curation, the lot. Guess what: on this (and many
> other) points of detail, they are either silent, or they disagree with
> one another.
>
> It is experiences like this (repeated so many times that this has now
> become the object of methodologies in its own right: check out the
> literature of 'knowledge extraction') which make me so convinced that
> the idea that a committee is going to magically agree on a single
> universal upper ontology, which is then going to be accepted with
> cries of gratitude by a fair fraction of the human race, is a complete
> fantasy. It is based, I suspect, on the idea that since humans manage
> to communicate well enough to cooperate in a single world, that they
> must be thinking about that world in more or less the same way. But
> not only does this not follow, the conclusion is demonstrably false. I
> invite anyone to actually try it, and see for themselves.
>
> But back to the main point. The other worry I have about 'intended
> interpretation' is that, even when working alone, one finds that the
> very process of writing the formal axioms sharpens and sometimes
> forces one to modify ones own pre-formal intuitions. Is a thing part
> of itself? Almost everyone unschooled in mathematics or formal
> techniques will say, no. Almost everyone who has been exposed to
> algebra or formalization techniques will say, yes. The change of mind
> is not really a change in ideas, so much as a recognition that
> allowing this limiting case of parthood gives such a cleaner and more
> useful formal description that it is worth putting up with the slight
> linguistic frisson which wants a 'part' to be something, well, smaller
> or less significant than the whole (and wants a subset to be less than
> the whole, and prefers < to =<, and so on.) Insisting upon fixing the
> intended meanings in cases like this is in fact a symptom of bad
> ontology engineering practice, a kind of naive stubbornness that
> refuses to allow useful engineering optimizations. So even apart from
> the fact that we all disagree, and even allowing for the fact that we
> are talking about intentions, I still think Pat C is wrong :-)
>
> Pat H
>
>
>
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>
>
>
>
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