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Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontologies vs. Web Ontologies

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: John Bottoms <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 21:58:30 -0400
Message-id: <50874B46.3010607@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Liam,    (01)

My understanding is that there is a cardinal number that is the digit 
"3". There is also an adjective "3" that describes a quantity. To which 
do you refer?    (02)

-John Bottoms
  FirstStar Systems
  Concord, MA USA
  Not far from Walden Pond    (03)

On 10/23/2012 8:22 PM, Liam D. Gray wrote:
> William, by unified spacetime do you mean a field with time as the
> fourth-dimension?
>
> Such that an event could be described as taking place at a certain
> place and time, with a four-element vector of data types for position
> in space and time?
>
> And event might be a thing described by date/time. But it kinda makes
> sense for date/time to be metrics rather than things.
>
> Three is a thing, and blue is a thing, /arguably/, and such arguments
> could be reasonable. And yet, if there were only nouns and no
> adjectives or numbers, how could we describe or quantify anything?
>
> I guess this one goes all the way back to early philosophers --
> materialists, idealists, etc... We may not be able to agree one /what
> is/ but we may be able to come to a consensus that describes the
> existing consensus about how most people typically thing about things
> and their qualities (or the data types used to quantify or describe
> them).
>
> I sorta jumped in here after a long hiatus.  Hope this is
> constructive. If not, please disregard... :)
>
> Liam
>
> On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 3:59 PM, William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx> 
>wrote:
>> I seek some enlightenment:
>>
>> Looking at this hierarchy, while it is questionable in many ways, I find it
>> troubling that a place is a kind of thing, yet a date/time is a "data type,"
>> and not a kind of thing.
>>
>> I sort of thought space-time was somehow unified. surely more than a
>> datatype, such as number, which can be used to identify a location in space
>> and time, and yet different from "things."
>>
>> I can only hope there is some practical reason for this I do not understand,
>> as I can more easily guess for many of the other classifiers and their
>> otherwise dubious organization.
>>
>> Wm
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 5:58 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> On 10/23/2012 2:27 PM, Deborah MacPherson wrote:
>>>> Curious where this list of facilities came from and
>>>> how they came to be organized this way.
>>> I just selected a few random examples from the Schema.org hierarchy
>>> to illustrate the discussion:
>>>
>>>      http://www.schema.org/docs/full.html
>>>
>>> This hierarchy was defined by the consortium founded by Google,
>>> Microsoft (Bing), and Yahoo.
>>>
>>> R. V. Guha was the person from Google who presented a talk on Schema.org
>>> in the Ontolog series.  Guha had been the associate director of Cyc in
>>> the early 1990s.  He co-authored the book on Cyc with Doug Lenat (1991).
>>>
>>> So Guha was certainly familiar with the methods used in Cyc, and he
>>> made some major contributions to them.  In particular, Guha's PhD
>>> dissertation (for which John McCarthy was the thesis adviser and
>>> Ed Feigenbaum was on the committee) was about reorganizing the Cyc
>>> ontology in microtheories.
>>>
>>> Guha later went to Apple and then to Netscape, where he worked
>>> with Tim Bray to develop RDF.  He also worked with Pat Hayes
>>> to define the logic base (LBase) for RDF.  He worked at IBM
>>> research for a while in the early 2000s, and he is now at Google,
>>> where he is working on Schema.org.
>>>
>>> So I would assume that the current Schema.org hierarchy was at least
>>> influenced by Guha.  I don't know all the reasons why he would have
>>> designed it that way, but I do know that one reason why Guha designed
>>> RDF is that he believed that Cyc was too complex.  He didn't want to
>>> reject logic, but he wanted to find a simpler foundation that could
>>> grow into a richer system.
>>>
>>> And by the way, Guha said that he would have preferred LISP notation
>>> for representing triples instead of XML notation.  That may be one
>>> reason why Google is emphasizing JSON for Schema.org -- JSON is
>>> basically LISP with square brackets and curly braces.
>>>
>>> John
>>>
>>> PS:  If I were forced to bet on a W3C design vs a Google design
>>> as the likely direction for the future, I'd lean toward Google.
>>> But Google has quite a few abandoned designs on their garbage
>>> heap, and so does the W3C.
>>>
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>>    (04)


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