Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontology - System

[Christopher Menzel <cmenzel@xxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 3, 2011, at 12:00 PM, John Bottoms wrote:

"FORM AND FUNCTION"

"Form and Function" are the top level elements (Universals) for fashion and industrial designers. They spend endless hours in discourse on this topic. Yet it is solely the first level of their ontology. Thet have not progressed much beyond that point since the Bauhaus movement in 1919 and the indications are that this will continue.

I had thought that the way to start with ontology design would be to fix the universals, but even that is not possible as Lakoff ("Fire and Dangerous...") points out. If we must allow for alternate universals then it appears that we are resigned to use one of the proposed incomplete lattices, or to a set of universals that allow exceptions. An alternate approach would be to provide associative links from a set of references for universals that could be selected based on a context.

Exceptions (or other predicates) in universals may not be such a bad thing. Intelligence has always used exceptions to provide coverage for widely varying, real world situations, and exceptions are an under represented area of study and representation. I know the logicians wouldn't like that approach, but I believe it is possible using FOL.

It is no more meaningful to talk about what "logicians" would or wouldn't like than it is to talk about what politicians, or Europeans, or people with steady jobs would or wouldn't like.  To be a logician is simply to bring the clarity of mathematics to bear on the study of reasoning.  In fact, there are all kinds of logicians who study a wide variety of logics and who exhibit a wide variety of views about logic and its applications.  (Alas, too often in this list, "logician" is used pejoratively (and cluelessly) to connote inflexibility, lack of "real world" experience, obsession with minutiae, etc. (I do not mean to imply that you are so using it here.))

As for your point, I'm not entirely what you have in mind, but some of it sounds a lot like the idea behind what those logician-types call non-monotonic logic, which formalizes reasoning with default assumptions that can have exceptions. 

Chris Menzel

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