Re: [ontolog-forum] language vs logic - ambiguity and startingwithdefini

[FERENC KOVACS <f.kovacs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, September 18, 2010 6:16, FERENC KOVACS said:


Doug,
Many thanks. My focus responses follow below:
 > I believe that core ontology concepts are objects, properties and
> relations.

I suppose you mean classes of objects.

I mean objects. full stop. Classification as a qualification comes later. I am talking about how we decompose the world to arrive at concepts (may call it a pre-language state).
 
Is the distinction between properties and relations that properties relate objects to datatypes
while relations relate multiple objects or have more than two arguments?

We are nowhere near dabases yet.The distinction between properties and relations is that properties are created in a relation (which contains a verb element) of an object with another object. This relation is a mental operation, and the result of abstraction type of mental operations results in a property of the object that the operation is performed on.Thus the process includes the production of concepts.
Mind you the three core concepts are recursively defined.

This sounds fine to me, so long as the concept of object needs not be
physical and can include events and situations.

Events and situation are not core concepts, they are derivations (and may not be very useful in this model). The concept of object, just as object in physics is seen in a couple of templates. Form and content is just one of them, another semantic primitive

Personally, i don't see the need for distinguishing properties and
relations in an ontology, although many ontology languages do make
that distinction.  This seems a language-dependent distinction to me.

This is one of novelties about the core ontology on hand. The issue is how you want to reflect upon the world known to us in terms of NLs.

> In fact, the initial state.

Are you referring to the initial state of an ontology in the process
of creation?

Yes, I am talking about the creation process, in which we produce concepts and data among other things, which are products also in the sense that they need to be complete when finished. Complete means a whole, something like an integer
.
 Or are you referring to the state of a reference ontology whose terms are used to make statements in a knowledge base with no additional definitional statements?

We have not created a reference ontology yet, neither have we defined what a statement or knowledge is.

> is an object which is a unity of them and it is
> exploded through a number of mental operations. (Examles wanted?)

I'm not sure what you mean by an ontology exploding.  Do you mean
deriving all statements which are derivable from the initial statements
in the ontology?

1.It is similar to how the start of the (physical) universe is visualized. The word object means anything in your sight (see etimology of the Latin word) So you have an object in your view that you relate to yourself through a mental operation and conclude that its property (quality) is existence. Cogito ergo sum
2. Please, do not use quantifiers (yet) Otherwise nearly yes. The core concepts are used to semantically analyze the rest of the texts.

If so, i would suggest that this "explosion" could be carried out byformal logical operations -- they wouldn't need to be mental operations.

By doing so you would grossly limit the interpretation and representation of reality.

> With the help
> of these categories I can semantically analyze natural langauges and
> create an ontology that integrates the currently different domains.

> In this approach
> axioms and the concept of events are not of primary interest, because
> verbs are seen as the representations of relations

This is not necessarily the best way to model verbs.  In languages which
use verbs like English does, a verb indicates the occurrence of either a
situation or an event, with subject, direct object, indirect object, and
prepositional phrases indicating relations between the event and event
participants.

I am not modeling verbs.What verbs do in English for example is to make a message out of a cluster of words. To make a message you need a clause. Only clauses make sense in NLs. (Further reading : David Crystal: Making Sense of Grammar, Pearson Education, 2004, UK ISBN 978-0-582-84863-4) No further grammar/syntax analysis please for the time being.

Features of the events/situations can certainly be modeled by relations
that ignore the events themselves, but this would require multiple
relations to be defined for each verb depending upon what other phrases
happen to be in the sentence.  Using this technique makes it difficult
to add more information about the same event and requires multiple rules
to inter-relate the multiple relations that represent the same verb.

In contrast to noun phrases that basically refer to spatially related objects whether real or virtual, and are titles, headers, labels or tags verbs identify change and the result of change which take place in time, so they cannot be identified in the same manner. For identification you need to see the boundaries and in case of motion you must freeze it to mark its place in "timespace" to turn it into an event.
 
  Jill threw the chair.
  Jill threw me the chair.
  Jill threw the chair through the window.
  Jill threw the chair yesterday.
  Jill threw the chair to kill the toad.
  Jill probably threw the chair at the toad.

IMHO, the verb "threw" represents a different relation in each of these,
but each use can unambiguously represent a throwing event, with multiple
relations to generate depending upon the other parts of the sentence.

"Threw" above is not analyzed semantically, but syntactically, I am afraid. Nor is the way to come up with sample sentences is a plausible exercise, although I know its ages old.
What is a throwing event? Something in your memory or in mine or in a film? Do those statements above or any other to follow really unambiguously represent anything?

> (hence not limited to Boolean operators).

Why wouldn't the relations have Boolean truth values?  Is the point to
allow for probability descriptors?

Not really. We have not used any quantifiers yet with reason.

> Therefore the issuse of disambiguation as for dictionaries is a
> futile exercise, as the defintions used are sometimes incomplete and

Many dictionary definitions are certainly incomplete, but that does not
mean that they do not may true statements constraining the meaning of
the thing they define.

I maintain my point. We have not agreed on meaning yet, nor on definitions and the word define.

> irrelevant in semantic terms,

I have not seen this.

because for you the only semantic property is truth.

> this is why you cannot "merge" them (should try to integrate
> them instead) as they are not in compatible forms (content)

If you are referring to multiple definitions from the same source,
they shouldn't be merged because they are describing different
denotations of the word.  Each definition should denote a different
concept.

No, I am not referring to that case.

If you are referring to multiple definitions from different sources,
integrating multiple definitions of the same meaning of a word is
certainly appropriate.  However, sometimes such integration can be
handled by merging.

My point is that ontologies need to be integrated and not merged. Or constructed as a car is for that matter.

> and they are not modular either.
> You must accept that such a new ontology should be dynamic as
> many of you already suspect.

If the ontology is used to interpret NL text in an open area, the
ontology would be incomplete and should dynamically be expanded.

I believe you. But not open at the top end.

If the ontology is to be used to express the information in a data
base that has been in constant use for years, dynamaticity is not
so crucial.

I believe you.But you still seem to have problems with them as it appears from the posts on the forum

>> In math logic domain there is a kind of definition - an abbreviation when
>> they introduce new symbol saying for example:
>> definition
>> tâ?¤s denotes t<s or t=s

> In my "semantic analysis" this is formalization, a mental operation of the
> relation between two objects as indicated.

This formalization/definition is a logical operation between two
expressions (one of which is a disjunction,  I suppose the expressions
could be called objects.

I could rephrase that, but let's leave it like that, for me it is not a crucial point for the time being.

> The commonsense transcript is that an
> object (to be specified, otherwise it does not make sense) is smaller than
> another object after comparison and a few other operations also required
> to arrive at that result in formalization.

You are stepping beyond the definition as given, to interpret what the
definition means.  This is intentionally moving beyond logic.

> In doing this I used the mental
> operation called interpretation, the reverse of formalization.
> For any message (statement) to make sense it is necessary to be complete,

Why can't a message tell merely a portion of a fact, instead of being
complete?

This has to do with identification (definition). We are still talking about a message in a NL.Fact is to be defined though.

> which means that if it has (as it should have) a verb in it,
> then it should have person,

Here, i assume you mean grammatical person, not requiring the message
to relate to a person.  Person, in this sense, is a linguistic feature
of sentences of many languages, not necessarily relating to a feature
of the meaning being discussed.

Yes, you are right on the first sentence. A message relating to a grammar person does also relate to a person per se. We have arrived at the hairy business of defining knowledge

> number and tense specified among others to make sense.

Similarly number, tense, gender and other linguistic features are
allowed or required by different languages "to make sense".  Such
features may or may not relate to a feature of the meaning being
discussed and might or might not be expressed in the knowledge base
using the ontology.

I believe you.

> Or in other words "Media is the message" is interpreted as
> The message is instruction - in my translation.

I find this interpretation curious and don't understand how it
relates to your above statements.

Well, it was meant as to be an end of message phrase. The idea is that you have problems with databases because they do not seem to be properly designed, maintained, etc. The key issue is sorting, which is selection, because knowledge is an organized access to information. Apparently "the knowledge bases", or especially the internet are not organized sufficiently well to allow you to do the job of search, etc.Looking at it from the Moon it is not the data that are to be sorted, but the operations performed on them needs sorting. Instructions are data can be separated in the machines, so can be in human minds. lexical knowledge is one thing, procedural knowledge is another. It fact the later is more important as we know it from How to books and know-hows.
Sorting out the issue of semantic analysis by shifting away from the only consideration of the dichotomy of truth
properties will help a lot Computers are about communication and translation, which brings up the issue of harmonization/synchronization, for which you need common instructions/mental operations.
> Regards, Ferenc


=============================================================
doug foxvog    doug@xxxxxxxxxx   http://ProgressiveAustin.org

"I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great
initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."
    - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
=============================================================

=============================================================
doug foxvog    doug@xxxxxxxxxx   http://ProgressiveAustin.org

"I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great
initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."
    - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
=============================================================

 
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