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Re: [ontolog-forum] N-RELATIONs: Formal Ontology, Semantic Web and Smart

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "doug foxvog" <doug@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2011 16:34:01 -0500 (EST)
Message-id: <50339.129.6.59.206.1320788041.squirrel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Tue, November 8, 2011 13:54, AzamatAbdoullaev said:    (01)

> i want to emphasise a couple of key points concerning my part of message:
> The task of ontology is to identify the nature of concepts or the real
> semanics of terms,    (02)

When natural language terms have multiple concepts/semantics/meanings --
including multiple overlapping meanings -- the task of ontology is to
tease out the semantics of the individual meanings, not to identify the
cluster of meanings that are related to each individual term.    (03)

> having the same things as the signified or as the meant,
> say, 'lexical" meanings, references, senses.    (04)

If you mean to distinguish the individual meanings, references and
senses, i agree.  I also note that different terms may signify
identical meanings (even if some of their other meanings do not
overlap.    (05)

> It's important to see how the relationships of meaning and significance
> are interrelated.
> For if the WORD "marriage" signifies, both
> denotes/refers/stands for/symbolize and connotes,    (06)

Of course, these are different properties.    (07)

> the CONCEPT of marriage
> means, both represents and senses/implies...    (08)

?? If the word has multiple meanings (etc.) that does not mean that
a concept modeled in the ontology should have multiple meanings.  That
means the various meanings of the word which are desired to be represented
in the ontology should each be modeled by distinct concepts.    (09)



> The class of things involved in the signification relationship
> (symbols-things) and the meaning relationship (concept-things) is the
> same.    (010)



> Still "marriage" is a binary relation, relating elements in pairs.    (011)

If by "relation" you mean a situation in which several people have
a kinship relationship, i would agree.  If you mean a binary predicate,
i disagree.    (012)

In computational ontology, relations are a product of modeling.
Binary predicates are easy to state and reason with, and so are
useful for many types of reasoning.  Higher arity relations are
normally used when one can not easily make a statement using
binary relations.  Such cases include stating orderings and set
definitions.  A higher-arity relationship in which each argument
plays a different role with respect to a specific situation can
be better modeled by reifying the situation type and defining
individual relations between the situation and the various role
fillers.    (013)

I would define a marriage as a situation in which various people and
other entities play various roles.  A (generic) marriage is defined as
having two spouses, and a (temporally constrained) binary relationship
relates the two spouses.  The marriage is customarily performed by a
third person.  It is normally authorized by one or more organizations
(governments, religious groups) and has a wedding ceremony as an initial
subevent.  A dowry might be part of a marriage (and thus have a binary
relation to the marriage).    (014)

Two individuals might marry each other several times (e.g., after
divorce or annulment), so a binary relationship between the two
people does not necessarily denote a unique marriage.  A ternary
relationship, with the third argument being the start time can
uniquely denote a marriage.  Note that multiple statements
involving more or less precisely defined starting times can
uniquely denote the same marriage, so no marriage has a unique
relation that defines it.    (015)

> What is of more interest is a triadic relations
> as "giving" or "asking"    (016)

or "marries" as in "Father Jon married Ellen and Joe"
 8)#    (017)

Why not model Giving and Asking as event types?  Then different
roles: donor, recipient, transferredThing (or requester, requestee,
eventTypeRequested) could be defined and triadic relations
need not be defined.    (018)

> or tetradic
> relations as "paying" (x pays y to z for w),    (019)

or (John married Ellen to Joe in Denver)   8)#
If you only model marriages by relations, how would you express this?    (020)

A Buying event could have the roles:
  buyer
  moneyTransferred
  seller
  objectPaidFor
and express your 7-item statement as:
  (isa Purchase1324 Buying)
  (buyer Purchase1324 x)
  (moneyTransferred Purchase1324 y)
  (seller Purchase1324 z)
  (objectPaidFor Purchase1324 w)    (021)

> etc.; to see how formally
> represent such n-dimensional relationships,    (022)

If one models situations or events, one does not need to create
different relations of various arities to express different things
about the same event.    (023)

> and if reducing polyadic relations to dyadic ones is validated,
> or what a cyclic order of relations
> is, and so on.    (024)



> Azamat
> ...    (025)

=============================================================
doug foxvog    doug@xxxxxxxxxx   http://ProgressiveAustin.org    (026)

"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.
=============================================================    (027)


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