Re: [ontolog-forum] Simplifying the language and tools for teaching and

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 5:40 AM, Matthew West <dr.matthew.west@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear John and William,

Mathew,

Thanks so much for your fullsome explanation.
I spoke in ignorance of what you were doing here.
 

> Yes.  The word 'class' is useless baggage that creates more confusion
> than it's worth.

MW: Not at all. You need to have a way of dealing with different levels of
classification. It is helpful to have a regular way to do this in an
ontology. You can use different conventions than in ISO 15926 or HQDM, but
if you use none, you are likely to create something very confusing.

Related to what you say below,

at least in the common western languages I know about, and their cocomitant patters of thought

1/ types of things (in a general, unmodelled sense, so not differentiated from classes, etc. etc. etc.) are a special case, treated different from n-nary relations, and it is even normal to reify n-nary relations and events into types of things.  For example, marriage, giving, singing, hurricanes, battles, colds.

2/ these types are used as a foundation for most everything else: for example, "KIND of an X."  'Kind' without what the X is makes little sense.  And to me, most importantly, the 'SAME X as'.  (I believe that 'same' always carries an implicit same 'what?' )

In fact, I recall believingthat many-sorted logics were much closer models of thought in most languages, and even once wrote a paper modeling syllogisms with many sorted logics.

So, as you suggest below, for teaching the basics, starting with types of things, and THEN explaining that they are unary relations, is a good idea.

But, I am just not sure that the added complexity of a language in which unary predicates, representing unary relations, are a totally separate grammatical category from other predicates is worth the trouble.

MW: The problem is that in ordinary English we often use words ambiguously.
For example, you can write:
Singing is an activity(1).
And you can write:
Matthew West singing Baa Baa blacksheep to his grandson on Wednesday 2nd
January 2013 is an activity(2).

MW: The problem is, that activity here has two different senses, in one
sense it is referring to something happening, in the other sense it is
referring to a class of things happening. Interestingly, Singing is an
instance of activity(1) - but not a subtype of it, and a subtype of
activity(2) but not an instance of it. So it is going to be practically
important to distinguish between these two senses, and you need to make it
as easy as possible to both teach and understand the differences for
superusers and domain experts to make the distinction.

MW: In ISO 15926 we broadly adopted the convention that subtypes of
possible_individual (spatio_temporal_extent in HQDM) being named activity
(activity(2)), physical object, etc and to go with
class_of_spatio_temporal_extent, class_of_activity (Activity(1)) etc. This
was not an exercise in elegance, but an exercise in avoiding ambiguity,
which turns out to be much more important.

MW: Alternatively, we might have gone for activity instance, and activity.
What was important was that we made a choice, and stuck to it.


MW: To do this, you can use the idea of a powerset. The powerset is the set
of all subsets of a set. So class_of_activity can be thought of as the
powerset of activity. Now I have a data structure where I can store the
subtypes of activity without having to add them as subtypes to the data
model. Generally, the subtypes of spatio-temporal extent need some
organization, and this is done with the powerset of
class_of_spatio_temporal_extent, which logically enough is
class_of_class_of_spatio_temporal_extent.

Regards

Matthew West
Information  Junction
Tel: +44 1489 880185
Mobile: +44 750 3385279
Skype: dr.matthew.west
matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.informationjunction.co.uk/
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/

This email originates from Information Junction Ltd. Registered in England
and Wales No. 6632177.
Registered office: 2 Brookside, Meadow Way, Letchworth Garden City,
Hertfordshire, SG6 3JE.




_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J

-- 
William Frank

413/376-8167


_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/  
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/  
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ 
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J    (01)