Just one comment: (01)
PC> For the given case, the sociobiology domain ontology would in effect be
defining a subtype of human that is descended from early hominids
"HumansDescendedFromAfricanHominids", and the assertions in that ontology
would be about that subtype, whatever term is used to label it in the
sociobiology ontology. (02)
Why would anyone want the resulting ontology to assert that, in the real
world there are humans and there is a special subtype of humans who
happen to be descended from early hominids in Africa? Aren't we all? Who
are these others? (03)
What worries me is that this results in something which appears to make
an assertion about the real world which is at variance with the real
world, namely that the new class of humans are a sub-type in reality,
which they are not. (04)
Perhaps some other model relationship, other than generalization /
specialization, is needed for ontology interoperation. If one creates
something the result of which is at variance with reality, how is one to
explain to a business user (the real people who we hope will see some
benefit in ontologies and review them for business accuracy), that the
ontology now has some special meaning for this relationship. (05)
Perhaps the answer is some kind of formal notation of context or
perspective. I don't know. But (ab)using existing model relationships
which have a well understood meaning, surely can't be the answer? (06)
Mike (07)
Patrick Cassidy wrote:
> A response to Pat Hayes's note on changes in meaning:
>
>
>> [PC] > > I do question
>>
>>> that users of an ontology will *want* the meanings of their already-
>>> defined ontology elements to change as new elements are added.
>>> But PatH has said (it seems) that this is what he wants.
>>> I will be eager for clarification.
>>>
>> [PH] > We must be at cross purposes.
>>
>> Suppose we are developing the ontology and we notice something
>> missing. Perhaps we have introduced a distinction between occurrents
>> and continuants, but had not noticed that one of our high-level
>> classes now needs to be subdivided into two categories, an old axiom
>> which quantifies over the union needs to be rewritten as two axioms
>> using distinct styles of atomic statements involving the temporal
>> parameter. This involves deleting an axiom and replacing it with two
>> others. The set of entailments changes, fortunately, as the axioms
>> before this change implied (inadvertently, but they did in fact imply)
>> that the high-level class in question was empty. The axioms had a bug
>> in them, and we have now fixed that bug.
>>
>> Why would anyone NOT want conceptual bugs to be fixed in this way?
>>
>>
>
> [[PC]] Yes, of course we *definitely* want to correct errors and bugs, and
> when that happens the meanings of the elements changed will indeed change.
> This is part of the reason we want to get the FO as accurate as possible at
> an early stage. The question I had was about the effects of making *any*
> change at all, where it seemed that PatH was saying that we should *want*
> the meanings of *everything* to change, regardless of what specific element
> was actually changed. I understand that according to the logical
> interpretation of meaning, everything will change whether we want it to or
> not. But if the ontologist making a change at one point in the FO cannot
> foresee a change in some distantly related element, and in fact *wouldn't*
> want that change if s/he had foreseen it, how can we say that that change
> was wanted? If in fact the unexpected change is not wanted, then the change
> made can be considered as a bug in the ontology. So, to avoid unintended
> changes it would be necessary to have some suite of test programs so that
> undesirable, unforeseen, and unintended changes that affect programs can be
> detected. When that happens, the ontology change that causes an undesirable
> change in program performance will have to be rescinded, or something else
> modified to restore the desired behavior.
> So yes, **when we explicitly want to** change some element's program
> performance (or correct an error in the model), then it should be done. But
> if we don't want to change some element's program behavior, I found it odd
> to say that we do *want* to change its meaning (reflected for our purposes
> in the program's behavior) when we change *anything else* in the ontology.
>
>
>> [PH] > Why would anyone want the meanings of terms to be fixed, regardless
>>
> of
>
>> what axioms were written to establish or capture those meanings? If
>> this were so, there would be no purpose in writing axioms at all.
>>
>
> [[PC]] Beats me. That isn't what I said. I said that we would want the
> meanings to be as stable as possible, but clearly some meanings will *have*
> to change if bugs are detected. However, this is only talking about the FO
> itself. When linked with a domain ontology, there is a different issue,
> which PatH raises below.
>
>
>
>> [PH. > Now, I suspect that your position is that of course we want this to
>>
> be
>
>> so as long as we are writing the FO, but that once the 'core' FO is
>> done, we want it to be stable, and all the meanings of the terms in it
>> fixed, while we write the penumbra of application ontologies that fill
>> in all the details of application areas.
>>
>
> [[PC]] Well, we do *want* the FO to be as stable as possible, but it should
> always be open to changes to accommodate recognition of errors, or new
> requirements not met by the starting FO. Changes to the FO should always be
> possible, but if it works as intended they should become increasingly rare.
> If that doesn't happen, the accuracy of interoperability will be reduced
> across FO versions for an indefinite time. Where possible, systems may
> still interoperate by using the same FO version. Since domain ontologies
> may often use the smallest part of the FO required to specify the meanings
> of elements in their domain (for efficiency), it may be possible for other
> applications to find a common set of FO elements. In those cases, the
> systems posting information to the internet would also need to list the FO
> elements that they actually used as well as the version number, if they use
> a subset. I would expect application developers using a subset to test
> their applications using the whole FO, to be sure that the elements not used
> locally do not caused undesirable changes in the behavior of their programs,
> other than slow it down.
>
>
>> [PH] > And here we get into a more
>> technical matter, which is how to define 'meaning' so that this will
>> be possible. The issue, it seems to me, is that the only available
>> precise sense of "meaning" that we have, simply does not provide any
>> way to say that the meanings of some terms are fixed by some of the
>> assertions they occur in, but not by others. So if a term, say
>> 'Human" (the class name for the set of human beings) occurs in the FO
>> and also in some application module, call it M, then when those two
>> are used together , there is nothing in the semantic theory of the
>> underlying language which distinguishes the occurrences in FO from
>> those in M, when we consider interpretations of the combination (FO
>> +M). This larger set of axioms is simply a set of sentences, and they
>> all 'contribute' in exactly the same way to the constraints of truth
>> that the semantics establishes. SO I simply cannot understand what is
>> meant by the claim that just the sentences in the FO part of (FO+M)
>> 'fix' the meanings of the terms in this theory, while the other
>> sentences.... do what? use those meanings without contributing to
>> them? I am simply at a loss to know what is being claimed here.
>>
>>
>
> [[PC]] > I will take for simplicity at this point the case where the
> additional sentences in M do not contradict anything in the FO. Yes, the
> application ontology M will have assertions that are not in the FO about
> some things, or about subtypes of some types. If one considers this a
> change in the meanings of the FO elements, then each application ontology
> will change the meanings of the terms inherited from the FO. But they will
> not be contradictory to anything in the FO. So the FO provides a core set
> of meanings that can be supplemented but not contradicted. However, this
> will not defeat the purpose of the FO for supporting interoperability (more
> after the following segment).
>
>
>> [PH] > Take the example of "Human". The FO might establish that Humans are
>>
> a
>
>> subclass of Mammals and of Rational Agents and general stuff like
>> that. But maybe M is all about sociobiology, and it tells us that
>> human beings are descended from a race of early hominids hailing from
>> Africa. Surely this tells us more about what Human means, changes the
>> meaning of 'human'. Everything we learn involving the term tells us
>> something new about the term and changes, if only slightly or subtly,
>> its meaning. Where do we draw a line around the essential core of
>> things we know about humanity, that constitutes the single, eternally
>> fixed, universally accepted, single *definition* of the term "human"?
>> I don't believe this can be done. All our intended meanings are
>> embedded in, and take their authority from, some accepted theory of
>> the world. And those theories are far too big, too extensive, to be
>> something like a FO.
>>
>> Pat H
>>
>>
>
> [[PC]] There is no " single, eternally fixed, universally accepted, single
> *definition*" of any term outside of a mathematical theory, but the ontology
> elements in the FO can support accurate semantic interoperability even when
> the meanings of domain terms are made more specific than those in the FO.
> Assume that two ontologies accept the logical assertions in the FO. These
> form a common base meaning that can be made more detailed, but not
> contradicted, by domain ontologies that need to use the FO for
> interoperability.
>
> For the given case, the sociobiology domain ontology would in effect be
> defining a subtype of human that is descended from early hominids
> "HumansDescendedFromAfricanHominids", and the assertions in that ontology
> would be about that subtype, whatever term is used to label it in the
> sociobiology ontology. The FO would be agnostic about that assertion, and
> other ontologies using the FO would not contradict anything in the
> sociobiology domain ontology, if they don't contradict that assertion. But
> in general, if any domain D asserts properties of an FO type that is not
> contradicted by other domains, and the creators of domain D (who understand
> the intended meaning of the FO type) assert that property as necessary, the
> default usage strategy would seem to be to use those properties when using
> data from D, under the assumption that the creators of domain D are not
> making a mistake. No logical contradictions will be generated, and the
> using system will be able to generate the inferences generated by the
> posting system. A system that has contradictory assertions will have
> different issues, but they won't be discussed here. And one would hope that
> the creators of domain D would send their specialized knowledge about the FO
> type to the FO technical committee, to be included if there are no
> objections. Once again, we try to get all of these necessary relations into
> the Fo as soon as possible.
>
> But, let us accept that adding assertions about things in the FO ontology
> (which gives the FO+M considered as one ontology) does change the meaning of
> those things that *directly* appear in the added assertions, such as humans
> in the above example. The issue I am concerned with is whether this will
> defeat the purpose of the FO in an interoperability scenario. I believe
> that the answer is no, that accurate interoperability is still supported,
> and this will require that more specifics for the interoperability scenario
> be described (I did try to go through this in a previous email, and in the
> online ppt, but perhaps in inadequate detail. Here I will try harder). For
> this scenario let us assume that two systems have both specified the
> meanings of their elements using the same FO (same version, no differences).
> Simpler yet, no new primitives exist in either domain ontology.
>
> Receiving system S1 wants to use information INF that system S2 has placed
> on the internet. Since posting system S2 group wants its knowledge to be
> reused, they place not only the information expressed using their ontology
> FO+M, but also place the logical specification of all new ontology elements
> in M that were not in the FO. System S1 already has the FO, and now, to
> properly interpret information that is based on FO+M and relate that to its
> own information, receiving system S1 has to create a merged ontology that
> includes the FO, M, and S1's own domain ontology DO1. Developing a merging
> engine will be one of the tasks for the FO project. The merging process will
> have several performance requirements:
> (1) The merging engine will have to be able to recognize logical
> contradictions between M and DO1. If there are contradictions, this will
> raise additional issues, but for the simple case assume that there are no
> logical contradictions. Since both M and DO1 are specified using only
> elements in the FO, this should be possible.
> (2) The merging engine will have to recognize elements in M and DO1 that are
> identical, and de-replicate. This is true even if M and DO1 use different
> logically compatible views of the same entity: the views will need to be
> normalized.
> (3) Then there is a more difficult step: domain ontologies M and DO1 may
> have representations of the same intended meaning (same set of reference
> objects in the real world), but they may have different sets of necessary
> conditions for the instance types. (This is a consequence of allowing only
> necessary conditions rather than only necessary and sufficient in the domain
> ontologies). For a subtype DO1C of some class FOC in the FO that exists in
> DO1 but not in M, it may not be possible to be certain that any given
> instance of FOC referenced in M is or is not an instance of DO1C; it will
> only be recognizable as an instance of FOC. This may limit the usability of
> the information in INF for system S1, but that is the best we can hope for.
> We can only use information that we have. As mentioned above, the default
> assumption cold be that, if one system asserts a property of some type in
> the FO, then that property is assumed to be true unless it generates a
> contradiction. Some users may not want to make that assumption, it can be a
> local user option.
> (4) At this point system S1 will be able to derive the same inferences from
> the posted data INF as can system S2. System S1 may also be able to derive
> additional inferences that are not derived in FO+M, because it has
> additional axioms in DO1. This is normal for human-human information
> transfer as well, and does not impair what I consider to be "accurate
> interoperability". This type of ambiguity may be mitigated (but not
> eliminated) by maintaining a database (in the same location as the FO) of
> unique well-known or well-described instances of types in the FO and public
> extensions. It is also anticipated that, in addition to the FO itself, the
> FO site will maintain a collection of mid-level and domain extension
> ontologies that are specified using the FO, which will form a lattice of
> theories. Ideally, a natural-language interface will ease search for
> particular elements within this set of ontologies, to avoid duplicated
> effort.
> (5) If the two systems S1 and S2 can communicate, and want to transfer
> information as accurately as possible, both of them can do the merger
> process, and then both will derive the same inferences from the same data,
> using the automatically merged FO+M+DO1. They will both check that the
> merged ontology does not alter the intended usage of the data in their
> applications.
>
> So, when two systems using the FO as a basis for their ontologies want to
> communicate, there is an automatic process that can support accurate
> interoperability, via a common merged ontology. If there is only one-way
> communication (eg via internet posting), the posted information will be
> interpreted correctly (the inferences will contain all of those inferred by
> FO+M, and none of those will contradict inferences drawn by FO+DO1), but may
> not be fully integrated with existing information held by S1 because of
> potential ambiguity of the information in INF.
>
> I do not doubt that everyone on this list can think of some additional
> *potential* problems with this process. But the first question to be
> answered is: is there a better process to support very broad semantic
> interoperability with the same accuracy?
>
> The above comments distinguish two different issues that can be discussed
> separately: (Issue1) do we actually *want* every meaning in the FO itself to
> change when a new element is added, or do we have criteria of performance
> for the FO that guard against unintended changes? (I would use a test
> application suite to detect and avoid unintended changes) And
> (Issue2) given that the meanings of domain types will differ when different
> specialized types are created in domain ontologies, how will this affect the
> performance of the FO as a support for interoperability? (There will be no
> contradictions, but less certainly as to whether inferences about a given
> subtype in one domain do or do not apply to the parent type or a different
> subtype in another domain).
>
> PatC
>
> Patrick Cassidy
> MICRA, Inc.
> 908-561-3416
> cell: 908-565-4053
> cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
>
>
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> (08)
--
Mike Bennett
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