Good points, John ... but, (01)
"forthcoming"!? ... that session happened a little more than a week ago. (02)
As a clarification: the "Ontology Summit" is a 3 month series of
events ... OntologySummit2013 *is*e in session now (all the virtual
panel sessions, including the Feb-7 one your are referring to, are
part of the ontology summit.) (03)
Thanks & regards. =ppy
-- (04)
On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 10:44 AM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> In a conference call for the forthcoming Ontology Summit, Barry Smith,
> Chris Partridge, Anatoly Levenchuk, and Mike Bennett presented four
> thoughtful and well organized talks. Following is the summary with
> pointers to the slides and the audio recordings:
>
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2013_02_07
>
> On the whole, the presentations were good. But none of them mentioned
> four *extremely* important points:
>
> 1. Trillions of dollars have been invested in legacy software that
> runs the world economy.
>
> 2. That software will not be replaced for a long, long time. In past
> experience, the lifetime of a large, mission-critical system can be
> 40 years or more. Its replacements must interoperate with it in
> as smooth a transition as possible.
>
> 3. Every attempt to replace a critical, working system with a new
> one that could not interoperate during the transition has failed.
> The greater the discontinuity, the greater the ensuing disaster.
>
> 4. Every successful introduction of new technology interoperates with
> the interfaces, infrastructure, and conventions of the old system
> during an extended, incremental, and evolutionary transition.
> The duration of that transition is usually *decades*, not years.
>
> There was some discussion of these issues in the email list for the
> ontology summit. I'll relate some of it to the slides of the talks.
>
> I'll start with Slide 19 in Barry Smith's talk:
>> Candidate Upper Level Ontologies
>> – Domain Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive
>> Engineering (DOLCE)
>> – Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO)
>> – Upper Cyc Ontology
>> – Basic Formal Ontology
>> – all reflections of recognized need for semantic
>> standardization via upper level ontology
>
> That may be true of what the DOLCE, SUMO, and BFO developers say.
> But it is definitely *not* true of Cyc. Doug Lenat has explicitly
> said that the upper level is the *least* important. He said that
> *all* the detailed reasoning is based on axioms and definitions
> at the mid level and lower levels.
>
> The most important role of the upper level is to establish a common
> set shared terms for types and relations. The top level must be
> very underspecified -- usually with little more than type-subtype
> and disjoint-from links. The lower level "microtheories" contain
> the axioms and definitions needed for detailed reasoning.
>
> Cyc has been developing their ontology for over 28 years (since 1984).
> They discovered very early (by 1989) that a single, consistent,
> monolithic ontology was unworkable. Instead, they reorganized the
> ontology by removing most of the detail from the upper level, and
> pushing it down to the possibly *inconsistent* microtheories.
>
> Furthermore, I claim that the same principles are true of BFO, as it is
> actually used. Following is an example.
>
> From http://jowl.ontologyonline.org/bfo.html
>> Definition: An entity [bfo:Entity] that exists in full at any time in which
>> it exists at all, persists through time while maintaining its identity and
>> has no temporal parts.
>>
>> Examples: a heart, a person, the color of a tomato, the mass of a cloud,
>> a symphony orchestra, the disposition of blood to coagulate, the lawn and
>> atmosphere in front of our building
>>
>> Synonyms: endurant
>> Disjoint With:
>> occurrent
>
> For the formal ontology (in OWL), that English definition is a comment
> that has no effect on any computation. The relation "Disjoint With"
> is the only information that distinguishes the very underspecified
> term 'continuant' from the equally underspecified term 'occcurrent'.
>
> But that assumption is inconsistent with the BFO practice. The only
> formal constraint is that the subtree under 'continuant is disjoint
> from the one under 'occurrent'. The metaphysics stated in English has
> no influence on any of the reasoning with or about the BFO ontology.
>
> There are also many questionable points in the examples above. The word
> 'disposition' raises a huge number of thorny, subtle, and controversial
> issues on which professional philosophers have not reached a consensus.
>
> In the slides by Chris Partridge, I very strongly agree with the first
> half dozen slides about the need for an architecture based on a "shared
> understanding" among the key developers. I disagree with later points:
>
> From Slide 9 by Chris P:
>> "Find a scientific man who proposes to get along without any metaphysics...
>> and you have found one whose doctrines are thoroughly vitiated by the crude
>> and uncriticizedmetaphysics with which they are packed"
>> (Charles Peirce, Collected Papers 1.129).
>
> I also quote that point, but I disagree with Chris's assumptions about
> the implications:
>> In other words, there is going to be a top ontology anyway, Do you want
>> to manage it directly (or manage the results of a heterogeneous framework
>> on a piecemeal basis)?
>
> I agree that every ontology will inevitably have some kind of top level.
> I also agree that it should be managed on a systematic basis. But I
> strongly disagree with the following points:
>
> 1. The top level should be based on subtle distinctions that even
> professional philosophers find controversial.
>
> 2. The existing diversity of heterogeneous legacy systems can be
> (let alone, *must* be) replaced by rigid philosophical distinctions
> that will be imposed upon every conforming application.
>
> Comment by JFS from the thread on the Ontology Summit list,
>> The distinctions an ontology requires are determined by its purpose.
>> Making distinctions that are irrelevant to the purpose can decrease
>> its generality and interoperability. Therefore, the quality of
>> an ontology should be measured by its *relevant* distinctions.
>
> Response by Alan Rector,
>> Amen...
>
> Following is a revised version of the recommendations that I proposed
> in earlier notes to the Ontology Summit list:
>
> 1. Avoid subtle and controversial philosophical distinctions in the
> top levels of an ontology.
>
> 2. Avoid making detailed commitments in the top levels. Push any
> complex details or distinctions into the middle and lower levels.
>
> 3. Design the ontology in a way that is easy to modify or adapt
> as needed -- preferably by automated or semi-automated methods.
>
> Refrigerator principle: When in doubt, throw it out. Any distinction
> that is hard to explain to a high-school graduate should be deleted
> or pushed down to a specialized microtheory that is designed for
> and used by the people who understand that distinction.
>
> John
>
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