Re: [ontolog-forum] Person, Organization, and Citizens United vs. The Fe

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 6:23 PM, Gian Piero Zarri <zarri@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear William,

 

"John"must be modelled a priori making use of a SPECIFIC AND UNIQUE instance of a concept like, e.g., "individual_person".

 

"Student" and "customer"
are generic properties, totally independent in principle from John and
from any other possible character. They must, of course, be ASSOCIATED
with John within a specific, transient spatio-temporal environment but,
being properties, cannot be INSTANTIATED

Does this mean that "John" CAN be instantiated?  I agree, but only by his mother and father and a little help from mother nature.    In my opinion, 'instantiation' is one of the three weird mental whirlpools that class-oriented programming has foisted on us.   Should we not be modelling the world, not how some software works?  Instatiation, in mathematical logic, means something else, and something good.

GPZ: I cannot suppose you are serious.

Yes, Indeed I am.   If 'instantiation', in "Computer Science" (but I am afraid  we are talking about a class of programming languages, not science), means create from a template, then we are not modelling any world I know if I can create something it makes sense to call John from a template.  In the world I know, I can create a credit card application from a template, and I can create a Dept of Motor Vehicles description of John from a template, but not John, and I find that **crucial** fact that has gotten lost. 

For example, if I can create a **description** of John from a template, where I fill in height, weight, etc, so too I can create a description of John's attributes, responsibilities, and performance history as a scoutmaster, -- i.e, his role in a  relationship instance of, isAscoutmasterFor, where the other role is played by the Boy Scouts.  That is, I can "instantiate" *both* if I can "instantiate" either, in this precise meaning "instantiate from a template".  

(Templates for instantiation being one of the many meanings of the very overloaded term "class" in class oriented programming languages and UML. Note that a template for instantiation is surely not the same as a specification, nor the same as a general concept, nor the same as the set of things that satisfy a specification, nor the same as the equivelence class of all specifications that must have the same extension, nor the same as an essential type or sort of thing. )

According to the common AI (and computer science) practice, to derive an instance (a specific individual) like "John" from a general concept like "individual_person" means simply actualising the properties (name, age, sex etc.) generically defined for "individual_person" with the specific data proper to John.

So, if I am actuallizing the properties, which is a wierd choice of words, when in fact I am only filling in the properties that John ACTUALLY ALREADY HAS, and I am just learning about them to fill in my form, then I can 'actualize,' in *this* sense, the properties that John has in his role as a scoutmaster.   Of course, as you say, the role is not independent of the relation instance in which he is participating, or of john.  Now *this* is a fact about the logical structure of the world.

Quite simple, I don't see in this context any need for neither whirlpools, maelstroms, nor jacuzzis. You could be right in saying that this is a trivialisation of universal instantiation and existential instantiation inferences in mathematical logics, but this is certainly not the unique example of change of meaning when passing to a discipline to another. See, to mention the probably most well-known example in this domain, the change of sense of "case grammars", originally used to represent the surface relationships of natural language expressions, and rerouted by the AI scholar in order to represent the conceptual relationships, independent from any surface realisation, of the entities included in a (deep level) symbolic structure.

This is not about changing meaning, it is about using meanings that the users have not examined as carefully as they should.  I think that so-called "O-O modelling" is a case of the emperor's new clothes.  

Not that I have anything against O-O programming languages, in fact I think that in such a language, defining a class called "Scoutmaster" or "Student", with the constraint that you can't create an instance without tieing it to a person who plays the role, and better yet, tieing it to the implicit relation (or "context") - student at what school?  is a very good practice, and not done often enough, since most programmers will simply have two ***independent* templates,  scoutmasters and people, and have a hell of time as a result, just as they did when they discovered that **people** can have more than one bank account, so not distinquishing between account holders and people gave another whole generation of programmers meaningless employment.  I even imagine this is close to what you are saying, but to me in an abstruse language.  So, I object if somebody says they are "modelling" student in that way.  I believe they are *implementing* student in that way, and that the underlying ontology, that expresses the problem space, in which  'student' is here a role in a STU-studying at school- SCH relation,   has not been made explicit.

 

 

>
> MW: I disagree that there is a proliferation of records, for accidental
> properties you have to  have some record that represents the period of time
> the object has the accidental property. The rest is just about what you want
> to call it.

GPZ: I agree but, at least for clarity's sake, I prefer to keep the
"record" used to represent a transient property of John conceptually
distinct from the record used to represent the properties of John as a
standard individual.

I think it would be hard to find someone to disagree with that.

GPZ: Thank you William for you warm support.

What I would choose to call this is, there is a relationship called marriage.  The marriage of john and cecialiia is and instance of that relationship. In that relationship, John plays the role of husband.  So, The role instance of husband in a marriage relationship is  linked to john.  It is the marriage  that has the dates, places of occurence, etc., as attributes. John as husband has a few too, but they are fully dependent on John as john and the marriage instance.  No marriage, no john as husband. No john, no john as husband.
 

 

Best regards,


G.P. Zarri




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