I would definitely recommend anyone to read Ronald's work. My own work
has been very different but I have also been struck by the difference
between what's developed for the Semantic Web, and the more
old-fashioned but vital industrial concern of modeling the business
reality in some formal way as a necessary component of top down, model
driven development of technical solutions to business problems.
Talking to someone the other day about this, it occurred to me that
many of the applications of OWL are themselves development exercises -
not a bad thing at all, but developing some technical artifact for some
design brief, is a different thing to the design brief itself i.e. the
conceptual model. OWL can be used for either (and has different
limitations for each), but sometimes I think people talk at cross
purposes since an OWL file is invariably referred to as an "ontology"
whether it's a set of squiggles about other squiggles, as Ian Horrocks
puts it, or squiggles about the real world directly i.e. a business
conceptual model of the business world as the business sees it, this
being a necessary precursor to /any/ design, including the design of
the first sort of "ontology". I guess it comes down to some explicit
statement of the model theory that applies to a given OWL (or other)
resource.
Since the two are not so very far apart, I would agree that it must be
possible to do something to relate these to each other. Maybe it's
something as simple as a transformation from an OWL-Full model of the
world as business domain experts have defined it, to a decidable / CL
model of those same terms? Or maybe, like all good design, it requires
expert thinking to make the latter artifact correct. Existing
approaches seem to focus on capturing business knowledge in a way that
can fit within the required formalisms (e.g. using controlled natural
language), but I'm not sure that's the only viable approach.
First I think there needs to be some realization of the existence of
these two kinds of ontolo-thing, and some formalization of the
relationship between these. This I suspect is where your more detailed
work on modeling reality will have a lot to contribute that many of us
have not yet thought of. I am intrigued to find out what are the
strange and sometimes disconcerting results, since I thought an
OWL-based, set theoretical semantics was sufficient to represent real
world concepts and relationships or at least to disambiguate between
these. Pushing beyond that to Quillian-style semantic network semantics
would be intriguing but I suspect that's not what you are talking about
here.
Taking it a step further, if there are multiple ways of grounding the
semantics of terms, it must be possible to find a way of formalizing
those different ways, within some single conceptual framework?
Mike
RK Stamper wrote:
Dear Sean,
I may have what you are looking for. I began work on it a long time
ago and the search led in some strange directions. At last, with many
students assisting, we have a solution that has proven most effective
in the analysis of organisations and the design of computer-based
systems to support them.
It called for a new ontology in the metaphysical sense, it is a
version of actualism and it leads to the important concept of
ontological dependency. Using this we develop ontological dependency
schemas that must obey very strict rules that force the analysts to
arrive at a canonical solution. That solution is shared across
communities and mostly across languages - one of our systems runs in
Arabic and English and would suit the characters in your example.
It is all quite different from the work on ontologies of the OWL kind
that seem to be the overwhelming concern on Ontolog. However, I'm
sure the two would fit together with great benefit. I managed to talk
very briefly about this with Ian Horrocks who agreed that his work
largely concerns (in his words) how one lot of squiggles is equivalent
to another lot of squiggles whereas our concern centres on the link
between the squiggles and the real world things they stand for.
Asking what these real world things might be took us into the
metaphysical field of ontology with strange, disconcerting but highly
effective results.
I am guilty of not having published an adequate presentation of all
the ideas but I'm completing a book on this treatment of semantics and
hope to make it available to colleagues this autumn. (A student is
kindly working on a website for that purpose.)
Meanwhile I can point to only a couple of papers on a site of my own
amateur construction:
www.rstamper.co.uk
The book will contain many detailed cases. Let me know if you'd like
to follow up the small amount on those two papers. I'll do my best
but I'm in very rural France with an unimaginably narrow band of
internet connection.
Regards,
Ronald Stamper
On 8/9/10, sean barker <sean.barker@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is there a named area of study which considers the specifically process of
of interpreting a sign together with the shared knowledge needed by two
agents who communicate (using signs)?
At one extreme, Agent 1 goes into a grocer's shop, and presses buttons on
Agent 2 for "3", "red", and "apples", and a simple mechanical system
delivers the fruit. Here the knowledge is all on Agent 1's side, and
includes both the semantics of "3", "red", and "apples", and knowledge about
vending machines.
At the other extreme, the two agents are people, say an American tourist
having got off the Paris RER in one of the suburbs, and an Algerian shop
keeper. In this, the American uses knowledge about common social systems,
and therefore identifies the context "shop" and so knows the appropriateness
of attempting to buy apples. On the other, the shop keeper identifies the
probable language from knowledge of a range of languages, translates the
phrasing to a probable match "Trois" "Pommes" and "Rouge" (including
allowing for different syntactical structures in each language), and so on.
Here both agents use a considerable amount of knowledge to be able to
communicate at all. (The complete sequence of "Hungarian Tourist Guide"
sketches by Monty Python can be used to extend the argument).
The reason for the question is that the semantic web relies on symbols which
are effectively decoded in advance (are the fixed buttons in the first
example or URIs in RDF). A major goal of the semantic web is to broker
communication between agents which either use common symbols or equivalent
symbols (sameAs). However, the business processes which stand behind such
operations ground the symbols in the artefacts and actions of the systems
operating those processes. Communication is reliably only if the symbols
used by both agents are grounded in the same way - I note that a number of
the arguments on this forum seem to be between two camps, one assuming that
the grounding problem is trivial, the other assuming that it is extremely
difficult. Therefore I am looking for a razor that can cut between the
"ontologies as a formal system" and "ontology term grounding" parts of the
discussion, and so ensure that both parts are solved.
I should also throw in my view is that the ontology classes used by a
business process are exactly those classes which label the alternative
routes onward from a decision process, and therefore define the grounding of
terms.
Sean Barker
Bristol
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