John F. Sowa wrote:
> Ed,
>
> I always appreciate factual corrections. I had heard that
> comment attributed to "engineers" for a long time, and the
> only attribution I every found was to George Box. After some
> Googling, I found many attributions to Deming, but none with
> a source.
>
> JFS
>
>>> As George Box said, "All models are wrong. Some are useful."
>>>
>
> EB
>
>> For the record, Box wrote this in 1979, which is within the memory of
>> the IT world. But mathematical models predate the IT world, and the
>> same aphorism was penned by W. Edwards Deming in 1947.
>>
>
> But what is the source? In 1947, Deming was in Japan, where he taught
> the Japanese a concept that perfectly fit their philosophy: TQM
> (Total Quality Management). I found many citations of Deming for
> the above quotation, but none with a date or source.
> (01)
Regrettably, John, my aphorism file contains an entry for Deming that
says 1947 and an entry for Box that says 1979, but no source for
either. But my aphorism file itself, gleaned from a folder of earlier
paper citations, is more than 25 years old; so I have no idea when or
where I acquired the 1947 date. I suspect that it came from whatever
materials were part of my first encounters with operations research in
the late 1960s or with information modeling in the early 1980s, and that
would have been one or more steps removed from the original. (02)
-Ed (03)
> Among the references was a note you sent to ontolog forum on Sept 18th,
> when I was traveling and didn't have much time to catch up on email.
> In that note you said,
>
>
>> So my tenets:
>> (1) the world itself is whatever it is.
>> (2) our understanding of the world, or any aspect of it, is a 'model'.
>> (3) our communication of our understanding is an inferior 'model'.
>>
>> I'm not sure whether any of those matches John's philosophy. I think I
>> may be close to the positions of Pat and Chris.
>>
>
> I completely agree with all three of those tenets.
>
> JFS
>
>>> We could adapt that principle to say "All notations distort
>>> the structure of the subject. For various purposes, some are
>>> better or more useful approximations than others."
>>>
>
> EB
>
>> We could. But it seems to me fairer to say, as semanticists do, that
>> the only way to transfer concepts and information from person to person
>> is to express them, and no simple means of expression conveys all of the
>> concept that the speaker possesses. Even the comprehension of a single
>> sentence requires all the trappings of membership in a 'speech community'.
>>
>
> I also agree with this point, but my comment was completely in agreement
> with your three tenets. I don't see and didn't intend anything unfair.
> (04)
I only meant that the term "distort" implies the creation of a false
aspect or emphasis, but the problem is just inadequacy. As an engineer,
I don't want to confuse signal loss with signal distortion. ;-) Upon
reflection, however, I agree that languages force thought pegs of
various shapes into holes of a few grammatical forms, and the result is
often distortion. (05)
-Ed (06)
--
Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263 Tel: +1 301-975-3528
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263 Cel: +1 240-672-5800 (07)
"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
and have not been reviewed by any Government authority." (08)
> EB
>
>> In my experience, there are intrinsically ternary and quatenary verb
>> concepts. English grammar supports them with the use of prepositional
>> phrases, but listeners use those prepositional phrases in comprehending
>> the verb concept.
>>
>
> That's true for verbs like buy and sell, which have 4 slots:
>
> Sam bought the book from Bob for $10.
> Bob sold him the book for $10.
>
> But English also has ditransitive verbs that have 3 slots:
>
> Mary painted the wall yellow.
> Sue gave the child a present.
> Bill considered her generous.
>
> EB
>
>> My point is that we must first distinguish between n-ary database
>> relations, which may represent compound statements or relations with
>> adverbial modifiers, and conceptually n-ary relations.
>>
>
> Yes. Many relations are constructed by joining two or more
> relations with fewer arguments. During the 1970s and '80s,
> Ted Codd and others wrote many articles about "normal forms"
> with systematic methods for joining and decomposing relations.
>
>
>> My point is that we must first distinguish between n-ary database
>> relations, which may represent compound statements or relations with
>> adverbial modifiers, and conceptually n-ary relations.
>>
>
> Yes. There are often very good reasons for defining "views" that
> add arguments by joins or delete arguments by projections.
>
>
>> SQL is a bad example, because it merges n-ary relations, compound
>> statements and adverbial modifiers into one grammatical structure.
>>
>
> There are many aspects of SQL that could be much clearer with
> a better syntax. But it's not necessary to mark every semantic
> feature by a distinct syntactic feature. Sanskrit and Russian
> have lots of grammatical markers, but Chinese has almost none.
>
>
>> So we have a model for what might be done as an RDF extension,
>> in much the same way that CGL is a CLIF extension. But we would
>> still have to get the target community to agree to understand
>> the chosen conventions.
>>
>
> Unfortunately, RDF became a W3C recommendation long before anybody
> had a clear idea of what kind of applications it might be useful for.
>
> None of the biggest web companies use RDF. Google will index anything,
> but they use JSON for their apps. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn have
> huge graph databases, but none of them use RDF. Twitter, for example,
> adds billions of graphs per day to FlockDB. (Each graph is much bigger
> than a triple.) RDF is too bloated and clumsy to scale to those levels.
>
> IBM doesn't use RDF for Watson. They used XML Schema to define UIMA
> (Unstructured Information Management Architecture). They contributed
> UIMA and supporting software to OpenNLP, which is an Apache project.
>
>
>> I am reminded of an observation by Sjir Nijssen that, if you give
>> modelers different constructs for similar concepts, half of them
>> will use the wrong one half the time.
>>
>
> Yes indeed. That is why it is essential to have a clear idea of the
> semantics and pragmatics before freezing the syntax. The first version
> of GML was defined in 1969. There was 30 years of experience in using
> the *ML family for marking up documents before it was adapted to HTML
> for marking up web pages.
>
> But there was zero experience in using that family for knowledge
> representation before it became a so-called "standard".
>
> John
>
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> (09)
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