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

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "doug foxvog" <doug@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2012 12:39:11 -0400
Message-id: <61ddd30defbe71d8081abe7fd660fe02.squirrel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Tue, October 23, 2012 20:22, Liam D. Gray wrote:
> ...
> And event might be a thing described by date/time. But it kinda makes
> sense for date/time to be metrics rather than things.    (01)

It depends upon what "thing" means.  Aren't metrics something?    (02)

> 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?    (03)

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, etc. are mental constructs,
parts of languages.  They may refer to things in the physical world (or not)
but they are not part of the physical world. [I'm not referring to tokens of
the words that are instances of these parts of speech.]  Such parts of
speech are properties of a word as it is used in some context.  Depending
upon the language (certainly in English) a given word may be used as
an instance of a number of different parts of speech.    (04)

-- doug foxvog    (05)

> 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).    (06)

> 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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>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>    (07)



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