Dear all:
Since the headline of this discussion is still my EKAW 2012 talk ;-) (01)
One of my main point in the talk was that Web ontologies sit somewhere between
(many) people and machines, so their type system must try to balance out
conflicting requirements, for instance what I called the "degree of
disambiguation / discriminatory value of a type" vs. the reliability of type
membership. (02)
In general, types that provide fine-grained distinctions are more valuable for
automated processing, like (03)
book - > a) book copy, b) book title (04)
restaurant -> a) legal entity b) location (05)
etc. (06)
However, the quality of data (to be more precise: the reliability of type
membership information) can suffer from more subtle distinctions in the type
system, because human users who are publishing data, either by explicit
annotation or by writing mappings to legacy data structures, may not be able to
understand and/or apply the conceptual distinctions. (07)
So we cannot take it for granted that an ontologically better type system with
cleaner distinctions enhances interoperability and reuse of data. (08)
>From the adoption of GoodRelations, we see that some of the more valuable
>distinctions, in particular product vs. product model and business entity vs.
>location, are often applied incorrectly by the owners of data. (09)
So when we look for types for Web ontologies, we must optimize them so that we
find the most effective ratio between (010)
a) the reliability of the type membership at scale and
b) the discriminatory value of the types. (011)
That is an open research question. (012)
By the way, I am not saying that this holds for all ontologies. But I am
convinced it is one of the key challenges of building **Web** ontologies, and
since so many people take the Web as a motivation for ontology research, I
think this is an important point to make. (013)
Best wishes (014)
Martin Hepp (015)
On Oct 24, 2012, at 5:46 AM, John F Sowa wrote: (016)
> On 10/23/2012 6:59 PM, William Frank wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Space and time are the containers that hold everything in the universe.
> A region in space or an interval of time could be considered physical.
> In fact, quantum mechanics implies that even a region of outer space
> that is a perfect vacuum would still have a "zero-point energy".
>
> But the coordinates of a location in space or time would be data.
> I would classify dates and times in the same way as geographical
> coordinates.
>
> In any case, I prefer the term 'entity' for the most general category
> at the top of the hierarchy. Literally, an entity is anything that
> exists or might exist. In CLIF, you could say
>
> (forall (x) (entity x))
>
> In my preferred ontology, I would say that events exist, words exist,
> relations exist, patches of colors exist, and information exists.
> The term 'thing' sounds too concrete for them. So I prefer to
> call them all entities.
>
> John
>
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--------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen (018)
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