On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 2:13 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Below is an excerpt from a longer note I wrote to that forum.
-
From: John F Sowa
An example from the ontology for High Quality Data Models:
HQDM
>> kind_of_activity
>> A class_of_activity all of whose members are of the same kind.
JFS
>> Much simpler:
>> kind_of_activity: a one-place relation that is true of every activity
>> of the same kind.
Happy New Year.
I agree with JS, visa-vis predicates vs. 'classes'
this is an aside, as these examples seem to be so contrived and unatural that I wonder about the enterprise they are related to.
(They also both seem to me to violate the stricture that definitions not be circular, a stricture our frequently-referred-to Aristotle seems to have often recommended. )
But what seems to me to be most fundamentally wrong in this discussion is the notion that there is a good reason to define 'kind of activity' separately from 'kind of stone' or kind of hope'. I would think that at most one definition of 'kind of' would be needed, for example:
kind of X means a characterization that is true of some x's, so distinquishing these x's from all other x's.
example: trees that do not loose their leaves in the winter and are native to North America are a kind of tree.
of course, every sentence with one free variable can be the source of a definition of a unary relation. But people often define kinds without naming the kind.
And, the fact that somebody named MW would claim that classes of things are supertypes of kinds of the same things is so far away from human thought that I am at a loss, or I am an alien and talk like the below really does make sense.
MW
> I disagree. Class_of_activity is the supertype of kind_of_activity, and
> you leave no place for it. For end users, class is much easier to relate to
> than one place relations, which is a logic view point. I would not wish to
> burden users with that. I might not choose class if I had my time again, but
> in ISO 15926 that is history now, and changing it would be more confusing
> than leaving it the same.
There are four separate issues in that comment:
1. What is the simplest metalanguage for talking about ontology and
its mapping to logic?
2. How do you define and explain types and subtypes in ways that are
logically sound and pedagogically effective for most people.
3. How do we design a good user interface and explain it to domain
experts who have never studied logic or ontology?
4. How are these issues related to specific ISO standards?
I answered question #1 in my previous note. The short summary is that
all the mainstream logic notations are based on four kinds of primitive
notions: relations (or predicates), quantifiers, variables (or names
or some graphic equivalent), and Boolean operators. Everything else
can be defined in terms of these four.
Aristotle answered question #2 in a form that is widely used today:
assign a noun phrase to each category (monadic relation) in ontology.
In the 3rd century AD, Porphyry organized the categories in a tree
and introduced the drawing conventions we still use today.
In the 1940s, Sister Miriam Joseph taught that logic to freshman
English majors with a popular and widely reprinted textbook:
Joseph, Sister Miriam. The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic,
Grammar, and Rhetoric. Paul Dry Books. (Available for $16.11)
I recommended this book as a good introduction to ontology and knowledge
representation, and Pat Hayes agreed. I also recommend the style of
writing in that book for anybody who is teaching an intro to ontology.
For question #3, my recommendation is to develop tools that use the same
terminology and diagrams that the domain experts use. That means that
we need tools that can support controlled NLs and widely used graphics.
The tools should support methods for tailoring the graphics by adapting
symbols, shapes, and styles to the conventions of any special domain.
For question #4, we cannot change any official standard. But we can
recommend mappings of the standards to and from the notations above.
An example of Sister Miriam's style:
SMJ
> A young man tells a young woman, "When I look into your eyes,
> time stands still."
>
> Another man tells her, "You have a face that would stop a clock."
This illustrates the difference between the logical implications
of a statement and its idiom and emotional effect. She quotes
Shakespeare and other authors to illustrate complex and subtle
logical and philosophical notions.
John
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