Jack Park wrote: (01)
> Now I am confused. This thread relates to ontologies, their uses, and
> their creation and maintenance. What has a string serving as its own
> identity got to do with that? (02)
Well, for starters, in CLIF, a quoted string refers to the sequence of
characters inside the quotation marks. That way you can talk about what
the string itself is. That is different from using the string in the
role of identifier for some other object, which is what we usually call
a "name". The string itself is not a name. Name is a use of the string
in relation to something else. (03)
When Matt wrote:
> A name can be its own identity. More particularly, the string used as
> a name can be its own identity. (04)
I believe this is the distinction he was making. (05)
Godfrey Rust wrote: (06)
> In some contexts yes, though I routinely work designing systems (as I'm sure
> many others do) where names need their own identities so that statements can
> be made about the name (for an example which I am dealing with right now: in
> which territory is this identifier recognised, where the identifier type has
> no inherent territorial limitations?), and if a name is its own identifier
> then that may be ambiguous. (07)
Terminological systems make a careful distinction here between a name
string and the relationship of a name to a thing, which is usually
called "designation" (although there are other terms, like
"reference"). This is the distinction Godfrey is making. The
designation relationship may implicitly or explicitly involve some
context of reference, and in general, the proper model is a ternary
relation: _sign_ refers to _thing_ in _context_, where _sign_ is a
lingustic term that means some external manifestation -- a text string,
an utterance, a gesture, an image, etc. In that sense, a 'name' is a
sign (a string or utterance) as used in a designation. And _context_ is
an undefined symbol whose definition is the source of many religious
wars in the discipline. (08)
If you love OWL, then 'designation' is a class of relationships, each of
which is an instantiation of 'sign refers to thing' (aka 'thing has
name') and each of which 'occurs in' an instance of 'context'. In the
last two years, I think I have seen at least 4 standards activities who
have different models of exactly these concepts. (09)
A further note: whether you think of 'name' as the designation
relationship or the role of the sign in a 'designation' is really
immaterial: the instance of the role (per se) is unique to the instance
of the designation relationship. The confusion arises from using 'name'
to refer to the sign itself, and seeing the designation relationship as
a property of the sign, that is, thinking of the referent of the string
as a property of the string. In natural languages and many information
systems, that model is naive, and not ontologically robust. That said,
formal languages often do exactly that -- they declare that the
interpretation of a symbol of a certain kind is its (unique) referent
-- but they have the luxury of enforcing a controlled vocabulary and
formalizing the concepts of reference they use. (010)
> But I made my tongue in cheek remark (011)
which I thought quite apt, thank you (012)
> because the
> issue that John describes reflects the real world problem of "meta-metadata"
> being much larger than the metadata it is describing, which I am finding is
> increasingly a practical concern as the need for identity becomes more and
> more granular.
> (013)
I would argue that this version of 'turtles all the way down' is
fictitious. There are indeed cases in which there is value to a
possibly very long source tree, like an etymology or a genealogy, but
they are rare, and they all stop where some practical consideration
intervenes, the usual one being the total lack of value to further
pursuit. (In the particular case of genealogy, the practical
consideration is the absence of any reliable source, but that didn't
stop etymologists. ;-) ) (014)
-Ed (015)
--
Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263 Tel: +1 301-975-3528
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263 FAX: +1 301-975-4694 (016)
"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
and have not been reviewed by any Government authority." (017)
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