Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontology of Commands

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

You are right, Amanda, I was using "computer science" incorrectly.  I meant "software design practice". 

But , yes, as you say, the training materials for OWL seem to be done by people with little knowledge or experience.  To me, more egregious than noun-centricity is that they also seem seem to suggest that the most important, indeed almost only, relationship between the thingies represented in the ontology is type-subtype, when multiple classifier entities that apply to the thingies, depending on attribute values and even associations with other things,  and part-whole are usually more useful once the depth of typehood goes much beyond three.   (For example, they have the types of the grapes in the wine as the types of wine, instead of as a classification scheme for wines based on grapes used, and colors of the wine made as types of wine, instead of this being a different classification scheme, locations of the terroir as types of wine, so that French Wine is a  type, and Burgundy a sub-type, when quite apparently, one would think, the matter is really that Burgundy is a part of France.

I agree with you that the noun-centric approach is an error. I haven't experienced it as a general computer science approach though. I really didn't see it in action when I working as an ontologist in organizations or projects that were focused on, or grew out of, AI, NLP, simulation, or broad-scope IR.  I really began to see it more recently as (1) OWL became more popular and (2) More projects started up that use ontology but had no very experienced ontologists involved at the technical, ground level.  I think that OWL and/or the most popular training materials for it, tend to exacerbate this kind of error. In these project where methodology is established without an experienced hand to guide, people will often grab onto something like parts of speech that is familiar, but not actually a good proxy for ontological significance.

Amanda

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 16:31, William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I am especially interested in your mentioning Donald Davidson as a source for "Treating Events as First Class Entities."

Computer science mostly seems to have taken the position that only the entities that are primarily nouns in Indo-European lanaguages should be regared as entitites.

On grounds of practicality, this is unlikely a good approach, for, as what started this thread, the organization of the things that we ask services to do (perorm actions) is almost as important as what we ask them to do it to (some passive data entities)

On grounds of fundamentals, which when ignored, tend to lead to practical problems later, it is unlikely that just because some group of people tend to *view* certain sequences of observable phenomina as representing a "Thing" and others of them as representing an "event" is not, to me, a difference in kind.  In both cases, we can make more than one observation over time, and say, that is the same walk that Sebasitan has been on for the last hour, this is the same hurricane he was walking in, as easily as that is the hat he is wearing.   I do seem to vaguely recall that there are northwest North American Indian languages that do not make any distinction between these kinds of cases.  "Being John Malkovich" and "being the eating of a salmon by a bear" are, in this language, each regarded as "things" or alternatively, are both regarded as "events" (since no difference is made between the two).  Both events take some time, one event simply take much longer than the other.   Perhaps the difference is really only in the number of relations that are required to define the event as it is thought of.  Three for the eating, only one for John.  

 

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 4:02 PM, Simon Spero <sesuncedu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Obrst, Leo J. <lobrst@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

 

KQML performatives: http://jmvidal.cse.sc.edu/talks/agentcommunication/kqmlperformatives.html/

Heh - Haven't heard that mentioned in a while;. I always had the impression that KQML sort-of fizzled out; I don't think anyone was working with it when I was at EIT 94-95.  

I am notifying the subscribers of this list  of a few  sources that might be useful to them (there are several different topics that have come up on this thread by typing << 

The foundational work on speech acts is John Austin's "How to do things with words."  (Austin 1962).  John Searle aso wrote on the subject. 

---

An important work  on actions and events  is Davidson's "Essays on Action and Events".  (Davidson 1980).   Good commentaries  can be found in LePore, E. and McLaughlin, B. P. , eds.  (1988).   

The Davidsonian approach treats events as first class entities. We can represent the meaning of "Sebastian walked in Bologna at midnight"  as a series of statements:

   There is a Walking, Walk1.  

   A walker in  Walk1 is Sebastian. 

   A location of Walk1 is Bologna.

   A time of Walk1 is midnight. 

An advantage of using this approach as compared to using predicates with an argument for each adverbial modifier of the walk is that the number of  such modifiers, (and hence the number of predicates of different arity) can be unbounded, and it is not clear how to generate the necessary entailments - for example, that someone walked in Bologna at midnight; that Sebastian walked in Bologna, etc. 

---

Wordnet - http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ -  contains a hierarchy of verbs; however Wordnet is not not an ontology, and there are known issues in the hierarchy (see e.g. Richens 2008). 

Cyc uses a Davidsonian model of events;  

Some  high level concepts included in opencyc are documented under "Doing" - http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/vocab/doing-vocab.html . 

Some more specific  types of events include "Transformation"  - http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/vocab/transform-vocab.html and "Movement" - http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/vocab/movement-vocab.html

------------

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words : the William James lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on actions and events. Clarendon Press ;, Oxford.

LePore, E. and McLaughlin, B. P. eds. (1988). Action and events : perspectives on the philosophy of Donald Davidson. B. Blackwell,, Oxford, UK ;New York, NY, USA.

Richens, T. (2008). Anomalies in the wordnet verb hierarchy. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics-Volume 1, pages 729–736. Association for Computational Linguistics. Available at: http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/C/C08/C08-1092.pdf

>>

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