Yes, Rich. I was only trying to point out that using the term “semantic baggage” actually encourages the thought that the answer is simply to get some smart people with no semantic baggage to run the world. My point was similar to the situation I have run into repeatedly in the area of interoperability – it’s an easy problem to solve: simply put me or my company or my government in charge and we’ll specify the standard/definition that everyone else (i.e., those with semantic baggage) should follow/use/comply with. My experience has been that people don’t like to think that they have semantic baggage, and have difficulty accepting the legitimacy of alternative views and purposes for a choice of meaning or representation of some term or concept. More often than not these alternate views are seen as evidence of narrow-mindedness, short-sightedness, self-interest (e.g., proprietary representation), or just plain stupidity (in the most uncharitable sense). The problem is that some of these pejorative factors do come into play, but my experience has been that even if you eliminate all these negative factors, you still end up with lots of legitimate alternate perspectives. So I think we need to counter the thinking that these different perspectives are simply the result of negative behaviors and stupidity – because it’s such a simple and easy excuse for dismissing diversity of perspectives that are really inherent in what different entities have experienced and are trying to accomplish. I have yet to read a published report in the news media on interoperability problems that doesn’t cast one party or the other (or both) as somehow incompetent or short-sighted. The message is consistently that if only these parties had been a bit smarter or forward looking (i.e., if only they didn’t have all this semantic baggage), this problem would not have happened. Such thinking might be satisfying to some, but it does nothing to address the real underlying cause of the problem, nor does it help the public understand that in many cases both parties built/did whatever they did for very good reasons.
I co-authored a paper on unanticipated context shifts as the root cause of most interoperability problems that were not simply errors in implementing an agreed definition/standard. One can argue that such context shifts should have been anticipated – and the SCOPE model is one way to do that gedankenexperiment in a more disciplined and exhaustive way – but if you look at actual cases, my experience has been that it often would have been unlikely or even impossible for the parties to have made different decisions at the time they made them. At the time the decisions were made, the situation that eventually occurred would have been considered “safe to ignore” or “we can’t boil the ocean”. We should still strive to raise awareness of possible context shifts/scope expansions to make sure that people/sponsors aren’t simply unaware of their possibility, or have implicitly assumed them away, as opposed to consciously considering them and explicitly deciding not to address those possibilities.
Hans
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rich Cooper
Sent: Saturday, March 10, 2012 3:06 PM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Constructs, primitives, terms
Dear Hans,
You summarized:
Your comments and example from the healthcare domain just underscore my point. I was simply trying to point out that subjectivity doesn’t have to be viewed as a pejorative term. Subjectivity, based on personal or institutional perspectives and objectives, are unavoidable and are the basis for interpreting communications from/with others in the environment. People often assume that subjectivity is motivated by selfishness, but it can equally be motivated by altruism or simply by things that interest an individual or organization.
Then we agree! Subjectivity is unavoidable, the basis for interpreting language acts, inevitable in developing any models including ontologies, and not only a selfish pastime.
It’s good to end on a note of agreement!
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
Rich,
Your comments and example from the healthcare domain just underscore my point. I was simply trying to point out that subjectivity doesn’t have to be viewed as a pejorative term. Subjectivity, based on personal or institutional perspectives and objectives, are unavoidable and are the basis for interpreting communications from/with others in the environment. People often assume that subjectivity is motivated by selfishness, but it can equally be motivated by altruism or simply by things that interest an individual or organization.
I do need to emphasize that net-centric operations are not focused on communications or the network, but rather on the entities and resources one can interact with via the network (i.e., “cyberspace”). Thus net-centric operations entail all of the personal and organizational perspectives and purposes/motivations, and associated semantic interoperability issues being discussed on this forum. Representing and being aware of context and scope over a network connection is in some ways more challenging than doing so face to face because of the lack of non-verbal cues we use to assess context and meaning/motivations.
Hans
Dear Hans,
Thanks for your reply. Please see my responses embedded into your email below,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
Rich,
I think it would be better not to use terms like “semantic baggage”, which suggest some lack of objectivity on the part of whoever defined C.
I can’t take credit for that term; David was the first to use it, but I heartily agree with the term because I firmly believe that the originator(s) of any ontology necessarily exercised their subjective cache of beliefs to create the ontology. That is really my point in this discussion. People are always subjective, even when pretending toward the objective view. We see our world through the glasses of a subjective experience from birth to now. Objectivity is what we call it when people don’t disagree much on a concept. That is why people can agree on very simple ontologies such as Dublin Core, but not on more complex ontologies.
For example, the new health coding system for doctors to use in seeking reimbursement has 140,000 codes, each with an English description. Here is an article describing one point of view on how that change from the present 18,000 codes to the new 140,000 codes that distinguish more detail on health conditions. For example, according to this author, there are 36 different codes for treating a snake bite, depending on the type of snake, its geographical region, and whether the incident was accidental, intentional self-harm, assault, or undetermined. The new codes also thoroughly differentiate between nine different types of hang-gliding injuries, four different types of alligator attacks, and the important difference between injuries sustained by walking into a wall and those resulting from walking into a lamppost:
http://www.amazon.com/forum/politics/ref=cm_cd_dp_rft_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1S3QSZRUL93V8&cdThread=TxBWPF3HLJGNLL
At the risk of getting into a discussion of Plato, the key point is that every definition of C, C’, and C”, are based on some context (often assumed and implicit), some frame(s) of reference for describing entities/concepts within that context, and with specific (if often implicit) scope, and from some perspective upon that context. Until we have a shared language for describing context, frames of reference, their scope, and the perspective from which the context is described, we will always have variations in definitions of C, C’. and C”. Indeed, there will be as many variations of C as there are context dimensions and scope values for those dimensions as might have a material influence on the definition of C.
What is the cost of developing these shared codes, i.e., training every physician to use the “proper” code for each condition of the 140,000 distinct codes? The context is captured in more detail than ever before, but will the codes be “properly” assigned? I doubt it. What is the motivation for the physician to distinguish states of mind, such as the difference between assault with a snake, versus self injury with a snake, versus accidental discovery of a snake engaged in biting the patient?
Let’s call this ontology of 140,000 codes, each code j corresponding to one context C[j], the health code ontology. But what physicians will actually memorize, discriminate and record health conditions correctly within this 140,000 health code ontology forest? The subjectivity of the reporting physician will be superimposed on this ontology, and the data that is actually recorded will not truly match the code. That mismatch is the “semantic baggage” mentioned above.
Furthermore, the original developers (probably a committee) who created the 140,000 code health ontology must have debated and reconsidered their codes many times to reach the complexity of 140,000 codes. But why stop there? I am sure there are other, more specialized contexts which could be coded, and also more general, aggregated contexts that could be matched against a vector of those codes. The choices they made to reach the specific ontology of 140,000 codes were due simply to their collectively subjective judgments leading to a result by the project deadline.
Which brings up another important point, namely that of purpose of the definition, or of the concept/entity being defined, modulo the above discussion. The purpose of the definition is what determines whether a context dimension is material or not. If the differences in definition of C and C’ do not alter the intended/desired outcome for some purpose (or set of purposes over some context dimension scope ranges), then they are functionally equivalent definitions in that context “space”.
A “purpose” is by definition subjective. I suspect that the committee making up the 140,000 codes in the health ontology considered some attributes of the health care situation, though even at that rich level of predication, The considered attributes couldn’t possibly describe every situation into which a patient can find herself disposed. Yet I doubt very much whether the committee members all truly agreed with the attributions made on health contexts. More likely, the chairman, or manager, or director, or pick some other title for the alpha leader, overruled some which she considered outlandish, added some on which she alone insisted, and broke ties among committee members to reach a politically acceptable consensus for her own context of working on the project to get results which satisfy her and her bankers.
So I still believe that there is a C- context, not just a C, C’ and C” context, which has to be considered. Large ontologies such as the health ontology above absolutely require politically acceptable contexts in which to operate. That context is the C- (if it could only be described by a perfectly objective uninvolved and unconflicted observer who would probably fall asleep designing the ontology since there would be no motivations for such an objective, uninvolved, unimpacted and unaffected observer. That is why those observers don’t exist.
This is the pragmatic aspect of “common” semantics, which many on this forum have brought up in the past. Commonality is a meaningful concept only if one specifies the context “space” (i.e., the range of context dimensions and scope attribute value ranges for each dimension in that “n”-space) over which the concept or entity definition is functionally equivalent among the actors intending to use that definition for some set of purposes.
Again, those aren’t “actors”, those are subjectively motivated and peripherally inspired politically directed participants seeking the implementation of their own aspects of the ontology which they individually feel are important to them and perhaps to the people they represent. The rest of the ontology, each “actor” must feel, can do whatever they want with it. That doesn’t make all committee members motivated to apply the 140,000 codes in toto, just in the areas they want to measure.
The NCOIC SCOPE model is an attempt to define such a context space and scope dimensional “scales” so that two or more systems can determine whether they can interoperate correctly for their intended purposes. Note that semantic interoperability is only a portion of the SCOPE model dimension set. Conversely, the SCOPE model is explicitly limited in scope to interactions that are possible over a network connection. It does not address physical interoperability, for example.
It doesn’t seem to me that network communications are as significant as representational divergence. The 140,000 codes will not be interpreted in the same way by all physicians, most of whom will only worry about what has to be reported so they can get reimbursed. Physicians are already over managed and overregulated; they don’t even have time to talk to patients much any more. At most, fifteen minutes goes toward listening to the patient and giving a prescription or a referral.
Analysis of the data force fitted into this 140,000 code ontology will be based on what little familiarity each physician has to gain about the codes in his specialty area. Yet all kinds of statistical analysis, classifications, inferences and abductions will be drawn from databases containing signs entered into databases purportedly in compliance with the ontology.
Hans
-Rich
Dear David,
You wrote:
… In this example, the terms as used in C' and C'' are effectively specializations (via added constraints) of the term in C. To transmit a C' or C'' thing as a C thing is a fair substitution; but to receive a C thing as a C' or C'' thing does an implicit narrowing that is not necessarily valid.
…
In practice, though, such an understanding of the differences (or that there are differences) among similar terms as used in C, C' and C'' often comes out only after a failure has occurred. In real-world use of any sort of language that does not have mechanical, closed-world semantics, that potentially invalid narrowing is not only unpreventable, but is often the "least worst" translation that can be made into the receiver's conceptualization. Every organization and every person applies their own semantic baggage (added constraints) to supposedly common terms; said "local modifications" are discovered, defined and communicated only after a problem arises.
Your analysis seems promising, but I suggest there is at least one more complication; the description of C must also have been loaded with the “semantic baggage” of the person who defined it, just as C’ and C” and therefore C seems likely to also be a specialization of some even more abstract concept C- which may not have contained the baggage of C, C’ or C”.
There is no pure abstraction C- in most of the descriptions for concepts so far as I have seen in our discussions. Every concept seems to have been modulated by the proposer’s semantic baggage. Since it is always a PERSON who produces the conceptualization C in the first place, it isn’t possible to be that abstract.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
On 3/5/2012 9:08 AM, John F. Sowa wrote:
Base vocabulary V: A collection of terms defined precisely at a level
of detail sufficient for interpreting messages that use those terms
in a general context C.
System A: A computational system that imports vocabulary V and uses
the definitions designated by the URIs. But it uses the terms in
a context C' that adds further information that is consistent with C.
That info may be implicit in declarative or procedural statements.
System B: Another computational system that imports and uses terms
in V. B was developed independently of A. It may use terms in V
in a context C'' that is consistent with the general context C,
but possibly inconsistent with the context C' of System A.
Problem: During operations, Systems A and B send messages from
one to the other that use only the vocabulary defined in V.
But the "same" message, which is consistent with the general
context C, may have inconsistent implications in the more
specialized contexts C' and C''.
My thinking began similar to what Patrick Cassidy wrote. In this example, the terms as used in C' and C'' are effectively specializations (via added constraints) of the term in C. To transmit a C' or C'' thing as a C thing is a fair substitution; but to receive a C thing as a C' or C'' thing does an implicit narrowing that is not necessarily valid.
In practice, though, such an understanding of the differences (or that there are differences) among similar terms as used in C, C' and C'' often comes out only after a failure has occurred. In real-world use of any sort of language that does not have mechanical, closed-world semantics, that potentially invalid narrowing is not only unpreventable, but is often the "least worst" translation that can be made into the receiver's conceptualization. Every organization and every person applies their own semantic baggage (added constraints) to supposedly common terms; said "local modifications" are discovered, defined and communicated only after a problem arises.
Should we then blame the common model (ontology, lexicon, schema, exchange format, whatever) for having been incomplete or wrong for the task at hand? Nobody wants to complicate the model with the infinite number of properties/attributes that don't matter. You just need to model exactly the set of properties/attributes that are necessary and sufficient to prevent all future catastrophes under all integration scenarios that will actually happen, and none of those that won't happen. Easy! if you can predict the future.
In digest mode,
--
David Flater, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S.A.