Re: [ontolog-forum] Towards a Goal Ontology

[jmcclure@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Hi JohnB, I sure wasn't trying to put words in your mouth! I was focusing on your use of "potential opportunities" (for resource enrichment) which led me to "goals" as a concise classification of your point.

I'm not sure about the relevance of speech acts to this discussion, as I was talking about the elements of a "story" ie the contents of a page in a wiki. (Classification of a sentence  as a kind of speech act follows from its chosen predicate verb. Like you, I believe "should something" and "could something" are good & valid properties, e.g., "should have" is a subPropertyOf "has". But anyway this focus on predicates is beside the point of what I was discussing: a catalog of nouns, not a catalog of verbs.)

An expository approach I believe is powerful because it is more attuned to common mental models than, say, DOLCE. I say this because I believe a key metric is how sensibly one can navigate an ontology to find a best-fit noun. With DOLCE, the first question asked is: Is this 'thing' something that has a "life", or not? How arbitrary! Instead with expository ontologies, the first question asked is: Is this 'thing' a who, what, when, why, where, etc? I would bet that most people would find the latter questions more easily answered.

SUMOs like DOLCE often do not accord with one's common sense about how reality is generally organized; expository grammars do, and that is fundamentally why they are a better tool. Which is not to say they're useless, rather it is to say that their ontologies are better mapped to common sense ontologies, for specialized inquiries, than the other way around.

- jmc

On 12.04.2013 12:31, John Bottoms wrote:

> jmcc,
> (see below)
>
> On 4/12/2013 3:06 PM, jmcclure@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxwrote:
> > John Bottoms wrote: "Humans are resource-centric systems and as such we pay attention to potential opportunities. How do we represent that in KR?" John B identifies a truly intriguing question: If identifying "goals" of a system is as fundamental as identifying the users of a system, then the attainment of these goals is the proper "meta-goal" of every semantic system. Should not every semantic system identify the goals of the creators & users of the system, using this info to modify/refine its operation?
> JB: I didn't say the goals should be the universals. Thanks again to 
> Lakoff for showing that the universals can be associated with resources 
> without explicitly identifying them as Maslow does, though Maslow is a 
> bit vague about them.
> > or some such, but you get the idea (an if-then!) So my view of the world is that all concepts are adroitly classifiable into the 6W's (who, what, when, where, why, which) and the 2H's (how, how much). Each of these can be considered abbreviations for Who Information, What Information, etc. And each is characteristic of every "story" or "article" in a wiki, truly of every resource that can be identified within an RDF stream.
> JB: The list can be part of Austin's "Speech Acts", the interrogatives. 
> The problem with Speech Acts is that Austin only considered sentences 
> that would physically change the world. And he only did it for a modulus 
> of 1 or near. His example is: "I hereby christen this ship "The Queen 
> Mary". The physical change in this example was the registry entry for 
> the name of the ship.
>
> He did not address changes of mental state that might result from 
> statements such as, "Your Mother Wears Combat Boots", the great slur of 
> my generation. Speech Acts are a good organizing structure, but needs to 
> be examined carefully, and not taken as gospel.
>
> And, my list differs a bit from yours; I include "could...have?" and 
> "would...have?" as interrogatives.
>
> -John Bottoms
> > Meaning that a "goal" is easily seen to be a Why, answering the question "why" such & so action is will/is/was/would be performed. It is a Why attached to a person, organization that can be cited as explanatory for, and motivating towards, a particular action. The class "Goal" is essentially an instance of the Why metaclass.
>  
> _________________________________________________________________
> 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
>

 

_________________________________________________________________
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)