Re: [ontolog-forum] is-part-of: a really, really, bad practice?

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 5:17 PM, <jmcclure@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

My issues with relations named like "is-part-of" are

This is interesting, in that the ONLY relationships I would like to see are of this kind,though 'is-part-of' is the most problematical.  So, we have made totally oposite conclusions, based on our mutual decades of practice and study.   What does this mean, I wonder. 

I have found  that the cleanest way to build an ontology is to severely restrict the relationships names, to those that are devoid of domain specific content, using only fifteen, To whit:

is a kind of
is a part of
is a role in
plays the role of in
is an instance of
is a life cycle state of
is a descriptor that applies to
is a data value for the descriptor D
is the data type of
is an actor in
is a policy of an actor in
is a resource used by
is a goal of
is an action of (as many arguments as represent things involved)

• the concept of "part" cannot be qualified without resorting to sub-properties
• the instance of the property itself cannot be qualified, period

Interested to hear what these mean. 

• multiple tenses (was-part-of, will-be-part-of, might-be-part-of) balloon all ontologies

I have never heard this view before.  What I have always heard, and firmly believe, after decades, is that the essense of an assertion is a proposition that is tenseless and modal less.

so that (John know Bill) shows a picture of the world, and we can modify the proposition with a tense

past(John know Bill)

now (John know Bill)

or modify it with various modalities:

deontic modalities

must (John know Bill)

may not (John know Bill)

epistemic modalities

Harry believes (John Know Bill)


etc. 

• the operative term "of" presents itself as a lexical afterthought

I think that in an ontological language,  the individual english words are not separate, but part of a singe meaning, such as 'there exists', and 'for all', and 'if... then'.  These just happen to require two words in English.
 

This is only one example. I can think of many others all conforming to verb-noun-preposition used to name a relation between entities (eg is-employed-by).

This would be something many would model as follows.

 

The impact a property-name exerts across the spectrum -- during input, storage, queries, exchange, etc. -- is one with real-life practical (read, expensive) consequences. Growth becomes unsustainable.

The most widely understood discriminator between "non-semantic" systems and "semantic" systems is that properties are named differently: in "old style" systems these names are nouns, perhaps qualified nouns; in "new style" systems these names are, uh, something other than a noun.

Consequently ontologies I see are near-doubled in size: they have both a class and a property named X, as "old style" names promulgate into "new style" systems.

I argue the industry badly needs consensus about the best practice for how attributes/relations are to be named. It affects EVERYTHING. Ontolog is the only forum I've found appropriate to this question. It really needs to be addressed - so much else is, imho, just a sideshow for all those focused on practical applications of semantic technologies.

Thanks - jmc

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-- 
William Frank

413/376-8167


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