Thanks Martin, I'm happy that this evidence is coming out from practical
observation besides theory and empirical science :) (01)
There is an interesting psychological study [1] on the value of ambiguity
(specially when it is associated with functional relatedness). (02)
We have recently found this as a byproduct of another exeperiment STLab has
conducted on the automatic typing of DBpedia entities by means of the Těpalo
tool [2], which we will present at ISWC in the next month [3]: when creating
collaboratively a gold standard for type disambiguation (we have used a
properly designed tool in order to facilitate argumentation among the expert
annotators), we have realized that in some cases systematic polysemy (as James
Pustejovsky baptised it, cf. [6]) of e.g. Stadium as a facility and a place, or
some of the examples in this thread, is somehow "ineliminable", because the
intended conceptualization cannot be reduced to a specific concept, but comes
packed with a frame (or knowledge pattern as I have discussed in [4]), in which
the same term is used in multiple, metonymical ways. (03)
This bare fact of human cognition and life appears also in more regimented
domains, for example in medicine I noticed several times (e.g. [5]) the key
role played by ambiguous notions that activate a complex frame, and cannot be
broken into pieces for any plausible interpretation, e.g. "inflammation" or
"diagnosis". (04)
In general, I'd say that ontology engineering should shift towards an empirical
approach that validates and motivates the application of formal theories,
logic, and philosophy in practical applications. (05)
Ciao
Aldo (06)
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027711002496
[2] http://wit.istc.cnr.it/stlab-tools/tipalo
[3] http://iswc2012.semanticweb.org/sites/default/files/76490065.pdf
[4]
http://iospress.metapress.com/content/6038458357588v43/?p=06bb61df7d6a43728a171d8d5510284a&pi=9
[5] Gangemi A, Pisanelli DM, Steve G, Understanding Systematic Conceptual
Structures in Polysemous Medical Terms, in: J Marc Overhage (ed.), Converging
Information, Technology, and Health Care, Proceedings of the 2000 AMIA Annual
Symposium.
[6] http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/J91-4003 (07)
On Oct 24, 2012, at 11:24 AM, Martin Hepp <martin.hepp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote: (08)
> Dear all:
> Since the headline of this discussion is still my EKAW 2012 talk ;-)
>
> 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.
>
> In general, types that provide fine-grained distinctions are more valuable
>for automated processing, like
>
> book - > a) book copy, b) book title
>
> restaurant -> a) legal entity b) location
>
> etc.
>
> 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.
>
> So we cannot take it for granted that an ontologically better type system
>with cleaner distinctions enhances interoperability and reuse of data.
>
>> 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.
>
> So when we look for types for Web ontologies, we must optimize them so that
>we find the most effective ratio between
>
> a) the reliability of the type membership at scale and
> b) the discriminatory value of the types.
>
> That is an open research question.
>
> 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.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Martin Hepp
>
>
> On Oct 24, 2012, at 5:46 AM, John F Sowa wrote:
>
>> 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
>
> e-mail: hepp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> phone: +49-(0)89-6004-4217
> fax: +49-(0)89-6004-4620
> www: http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
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> skype: mfhepp
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>
> Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
> =================================================================
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>
>
>
>
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_____________________________________ (010)
Aldo Gangemi (011)
Full professor
Department of Informatics (LIPN)
Paris Nord University - Sorbonne Cité - CNRS
99, av. J-B. Clement
93430 Villetaneuse France
aldo.gangemi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (012)
Associate Researcher
Semantic Technology Lab (STLab)
Institute for Cognitive Science and Technology,
National Research Council (ISTC-CNR)
Via Nomentana 56, 00161, Roma, Italy
Tel: +390644161535
Fax: +390644161513
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http://www.stlab.istc.cnr.it
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