John Sowa wrote: (01)
> The point I have been repeating in different ways is that there is no
> such thing as an ideal upper level. Many people have reached that
> conclusion after working very hard to find one. (02)
This follows from the fact that what is best suited for one purpose may
not be best suited for another. If one application uses a narrow number
of concepts, it need not have upper ontology components irrelevant to
the application. (03)
Certain ontology languages allow types of components that others disallow:
classes of classes, subclasses of datatypes (even numbers, vowels),
variable-arity relations, ternary (or higher-arity) relations, functions,
functional predicates, relations among relations ... Such types of
things might exist in one ontology, but not in another. (04)
A key division in one ontology might be the perdurant/endurant distinction,
while a 4D ontology might disallow it. Some ontologies would include
concepts such as events and situations, while others would exclude them,
using relations to model occurrences of these things. An ontology of
financial accounts might not need the concept of PhysicalObject, while
one on galactic astronomy would not need the concept of IntensionalAgent,
although these might be crucial for other ontologies. (05)
-- doug (06)
=============================================================
doug foxvog doug@xxxxxxxxxx http://ProgressiveAustin.org (07)
"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.
============================================================= (08)
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