Re: [ontolog-forum] Representing design

[Simon Spero <sesuncedu@xxxxxxxxx>]

Is your use cases, do you ever need to quantify over "Design"s?  Will you ever need to examine properties of the "Design" other than the set of individuals that meet its requirements? If two "Design"s necessarily always picks out the same set of individuals, are they the same "Design"? 

For example, suppose that you have a number different "Design"s for a specialization of a more general kind of artifact, where the artifacts overall length is not less than  26" long, where a specific part of each artifact must be not less than 16" long, and where a specific part is  considered to legally be the artifact (so that that part must be numbered uniquely, and if that part was defective and had to be destroyed, the destruction must be specifically recorded) .    

Would you ever want to find out how many "Design"s your system had that when implemented, satisfied those properties?

Would you ever want to find which implementations of a design can be produced using available material and machinery, and what CNC programs need to be loaded on to which machines when?

In your example, if "Hammer" is a predicate, what sort of quantification over predicates are you comfortable using? 

Are you comfortable with including abstract entities in your ontology, even if only as as a matter of practicality?   

If, instead of the word Design, you use the word Specification ("especificação"?) do any of your answers change?  Rules for determining if something is a member of a set? 

What about phrases like Rules for telling if something is a 40cm hammer vs. What does it mean for something to be a 40cm hammer  vs. What is it like to be a 40cm hammer? vs. Things that are 40cm hammers?

Simon    

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 1:00 PM, Sandro Rama Fiorini <srfiorini@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
 
> 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.

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