Dear PatC, (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 :-)
>
> I don't get the point here. (02)
MW: The point is that the very act of analysis changes our perception of the
intended meaning, just because it forces us to think about it and ask
questions that the man in the street would not think of. As more analysis is
done on related areas, this may further influence our original intended
meaning. (03)
> 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. (04)
MW: No, not the problem at all. Anything you can specify formally is easy,
and fits what PatH has been saying about it meaning what the axioms say. (05)
> The
> terminology question is only an issue when one maps the ontology to
> some
> vocabulary. What intended meaning am I missing here? (06)
MW: As I mentioned above, the intended interpretation can move simply and
naturally as the result of the analysis we do.
>
> 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. (07)
MW: That is true too, but not the point here I think. (08)
> 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. (09)
MW: As you know, I don't think there is an end to this process, but we can
find that out when we get there. (010)
> But is there any alternative
> interoperability tactic that can avoid this issue? (011)
MW: No. We just need to be aware of the problem and have a strategy to
manage it, rather than be surprised by it when we encounter semantic drift. (012)
> 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. (013)
MW: Indeed, it is like democracy, its awful, but there isn't anything
better. (014)
Regards (015)
Matthew West
Information Junction
Tel: +44 560 302 3685
Mobile: +44 750 3385279
matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.informationjunction.co.uk/
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/ (016)
This email originates from Information Junction Ltd. Registered in England
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>
> PatC
>
>
> Patrick Cassidy
> MICRA, Inc.
> 908-561-3416
> cell: 908-565-4053
> cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
>
>
> > -----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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