Great topic - similar to 'what is a legal statute?'
A design/statute must be a subtype of, say, owl:Class, each instance
being the type associated with later factual instantiations. I
specifically suggest a design/statute is the subject-of
activities necessary to its specification and adoption; don't burden
the design/statute with attributes relevant to those activities.
/jmc
On 10/15/2013 10:00 AM, Sandro Rama Fiorini wrote:
Dear all,
This list frequently rises the difficulties and ambiguities
involved in modeling the notion of design (as in “product design”)
and engineering model. We are now developing an ontology that must
represent these concepts and we are facing those same issues. We
would like to seek some advice from people in this list.
The ontology we are working on must deal with a conceptualization
already in use by a specific application. This application deals
with automated production lines that produce different types of
artifacts (hammers, for example). These artifacts are produced
according to their respective specific designs.
However, it is not clear what are these designs and what are their
relationship with the respective artifacts. Intuitively, we
consider artifacts as subtypes of physical objects. We consider
designs to be mental or abstract entities that specify instances
of an artifact to be built (but not *how* they are built, in terms
of list of actions). For instance, a design of a type of hammer
should specify what are its attributes, parts, structure and
materials.
That definition of design makes it quite similar to the very
notion of concept. The argument going on in our group is whether
there is any essential difference at all between then, and if so,
what are they relationship. Both seem to “abstract” the properties
of a class of individuals. Differences could be the level of
detail they are intended to specify. Another point of view
emphasizes that there is a fundamental difference between the
concept/class of Hammer (for example) and the design of specific
hammers. Nevertheless, their main content of a class/concept seems
to be very similar, but we are not sure whether this similarity
necessarily implies the identity between these notions.
The differences become even more difficult to spot when we
consider the design and its description. We distinguish the design
from its description as a piece of text or a blueprint. A single
design can have many individual descriptions.
One of the requirements of this project is that the description of
a design must explicitly refer to entities provided by the
ontology. For example, consider a design for a new kind of hammer,
which should be 40 cm in length. This design has a description
(say, in first order logic) “Ax NewHammer(x) -> length(x,
40cm).” According to our requirements, NewHammer and length must
relate to the “Hammer” and the property “length” provided in our
ontology. We could, for instance, rewrite that formula to “Ax
NewHammer(x) -> Hammer(x) ^ length(x, 40cm)”. However, in this
case we start to have the description of a design of Hammer is
striking similar to the description of a subconcept of Hammer.
Some people in our group quite understandably have problems with
that position, arguing that the content of the description of a
design should only reflect an existing concept, but it cannot be
the same as the description of a concept (to justify the
subsumption relation in the second formula, for instance). Other
argue that the description of a design *is* the description of a
concept, justified by the lack of differences between them.
The question is: what is the relation between design and
concept/class? We considered two possible answers:
1-The concept/class Hammer’ is its own design. In this sense, it
seems that the notion of design is only useful as a modeling tool
to group different possible descriptions of the same entity. It
seems to be interesting to think about the instances here. In this
point of view, both the concept and design of NewHammer collapse
in the same entity, abstracting the same class of individuals.
2- The concept/class NewHammer and its design are different
things. An instance of NewHammer is different from an instance of
Design that specifies the class of NewHammer. In this point of
view, it seems that we are proposing a new type of relationship
that holds between instances and classes, which is not the
instantiation relation. In this relationship (maybe called
specifies), a specific instance (of design) specifies a new class
of entities in the ontology. That is, this new class comes to
existence due to the very existence of an instance of Design that
specifies it.
best,
--
Sandro Rama Fiorini
Phd Candidate
Institute of Informatics
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
Website: www.inf.ufrgs.br/~srfiorini
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