On 25/12/2010 1:07 PM, Christopher Menzel wrote:
On Dec 24, 2010, at 11:00 PM, Ron Wheeler wrote:
On 24/12/2010 7:26 PM, Christopher Menzel wrote:
...As for part (b) of (D), I
have to say I am nonplussed. What do you have in
mind? Obviously, it is unlikely that any large
ontology with be completely free of modeling errors,
but surely the usefulness of an ontology is inversely
proportional to the extent of its errors.
Given the extensive discussion in
this forum about the meaning of some very basic terms
and expressions of very common concepts (even ignoring
the choice of English words associated with them which
causes all kinds of unintended meanings drawn into
terms), it is unlikely that any ontology will be devoid
of fragments that some very smart people who purport to
be "Ontologists" find defective or simply wrongheaded.
That could be true. Or not. Either
way, this issue has nothing whatever to do with the points
I've argued in this thread. My point entails only that
any usable ontology language must be such that there can
be no reasonable disagreement about the meanings of its
basic *logical* expressions or about such matters as how
the meaning of a complex _expression_ of the language is
determined by the meanings of its simpler parts. What you
are talking about are the *non-logical* terms of an
ontology, whose meanings might well be controversial and
might well evolve over time.
I never saw any of the heated arguments in this forum
prefaced by the statement of either party that the points
were incidental and not related to some severe
misunderstanding about the nature of the truth and logic on
the part of the other person.
I'm afraid I'm not seeing how this comment relates to the
preceding, Ron.
Just a comment on "the no reasonable disagreement about the
meanings".
...
The usefulness of an Ontology will
be judged by the ROI that it provides to the user
community which in turn will be determined by how it
advances the solution of a real world problem.
Sure thing. Again, completely
orthogonal to the issues I've raised.
I did not think so but perhaps you are right.
Most ontologies will likely be in
a constant state of revision as new concepts and
relationships become known and need to be added to the
ontology to remove some defect or increase its scope.
Think of the medical area or financial services where
advances and new products are daily occurrences.
And again. But hey: hear hear.
That does not mean that an
ontology is not useful.
Sure thing -- so long as it is
written in a language "based on formal logic". ;-)
Is there a commonly accepted list of these languages and
any other alternatives that are used but should not be or is
this purely an academic statement? If this list does not
exist, perhaps this forum is a good group to develop the
list and document it so that repository developers should be
aware of what needs to be supported for import and export.
Well, I don't know that anyone has actually compiled a list —
it would be rather open-ended, for one thing — but it's pretty
clear when you've got one. The various OWLs are obvious
examples and, hence, also the language of any (well-designed)
tool based thereon, e.g., Protege. Any Common Logic dialect is
such a language. CycL and most all traditional frame-based KR
languages like KL-ONE and its descendants would included. More
generally, the languages in question include all those based on
(some fragment of, or extension of, or extension of a fragment
of) classical first-order logic.**
Is this worth recording in the wiki as the start of a list and
permanent discussion about the relative importance of each language
and the possibility of move ontologies between pairs of languages?
Ron
-chris
**I don't thereby mean to exclude non-classical logics —
indeed, some, like intuitionistic logic, can be considered
fragments of FOL — although I think the use of such logics is
motivated by reasoning issues rather than representation. And I
don't mean thereby to suggest those issues are unrelated to
representation, but I think they are in any case independent of
the issues raised in this thread.
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