Re: [ontolog-forum] Defining everything in terms of relations (was Charl

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 11:46 AM, Cory Casanave <cory-c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Sjir/ William,

Perhaps we need to separate how we formalize concepts and the conceptual frameworks that people use, correspond with their way of thinking and meet their needs in some context. Entities/attributes and relations work and have worked for some time, there is a enormous foundation of formalized knowledge using this paradigm.

True, and there is nothing wrong with doing so, if you are using a technology solution space that assumes this, or  bunch of people who have been trained in this.  And, it is true that adding **an** intutive semantics to informaiton modelling is key, and is Chen's contribution.   What is NOT true is that this semantics is very intuitive, and everbody gets it right away. 
 

These concepts can be formalized as first-class nary relations but we don’t have to slap the users in the face with it.

Of course not, what I am suggesting is not that, but that as the background for a role-based sematics, with agents and affected parties and tools and the like (find a list of theta roles on the web.)  Having dealt with lots of business people, I have found they easily learn and like BETTER just listing every concept they use, and then tieing them together with concept maps, rather than trying to figure out what is an entity, what an attribute, and what is a relation.
 

The Entity/attribute/relation paradigm is typically (but not always) representing a snapshot in time so to formalize them correctly any relations representing these assertions would need to be contextualized by some timeframe or situation (typically implicit in a data structure).

 

While we certainly want to encourage clear thinking and unambiguous _expression_, if we are unable to adapt to and consume well understood ways of thinking we will continue to struggle to be mainstream.

Well, this is the argument of many always, Neutonian mechanics was mainstream.  So was behavioral psychology.     What I believe is that the important TOOL is UML drawings, and state transition models, not the semantics of UML, which I bet fewer than 1000 know, among the 100s of thousands who use the drawings.

 

On the formalization front, the problem I have with HasAttr is visible in its representation – it is 2 thoughts. 1) That the relation exists between the entity and the attribute value and 2) that it exists now

Nope, it is one thought. Thought number 1.  Then, the ENTIRE MODEL, or at least each separate proposition,  has to have a denontic, speech act, or temporal operator applied to it.    If this is a conceptual model for a domain, then that operator is a relative prescriptive one: "this is the way to use these concepts in minerology these days."
 

(has). Since many Onto languages don’t allow for 2^nd order statements or context these get mangled together and often create multiple properties for the same underlying concept (e.g. hasAttr, should haveAttr, did haveAttr, will haveAttr, Reified Attr, etc.).

Well, that is just awful, and that is the point.  This is another mistake of Indo-European-only speakers, they DISTRIBUTE the propositioinal operations in front of the verb, instead of in front of the whole proposition.   The operator PAST does not apply to the verb has, it applies to the proposition, "john tall" So, that the logical way to express this is PAST(john tall).  WANT (john tall) WILL BE (john tall). COMMAND (john tall), QUESTION (john tall).  If this seems weird to you, it is because you don't know Chinese, for example, and because you have not studied speech acts and verbs of propositional attitude.   So, because just about everybody who creates onto languages does this clearly wrong, just makes me sad, that they do not think there is a century of accumulated knowledge they could build on, it does not make me want to join them.  

In other words, the world on knowledge is alot bigger than information engineering, and other engineering disciplines don't **make up** their own science, they USE science.     We don't.  Shame on us, especially if we then argue we CAN'T use science because most people trained by us don't know the science, and already use something made up instead!

 

 

Echoing the note from John, I would suggest that for relations to be a fundamental foundation they must be identifiable and able to play roles in other relations.

Ah, this is missing the point, that the 'relations' such as 'has as an attribute', 'is a subtype of' , is a member of' 'plays the role of' etc. DO NOT have domain specific meaing.  They are purlely logical.  Everything else is expressed as a thingie. Now, an association is a domain specific thing, like a boss.  As in sally is george's boss. 

or,

There is a giving event.  George plays the role of agent in this event, the book is the given, and sally is the given to.

See, giving is not necessarily a relation, it can also be a thingie, and a subject or an object of a sentence.  Giving is good. I love to give.

Wm
  

 

 

-Cory

 

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sjir Nijssen
Sent: Tuesday, February 25, 2014 9:46 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Defining everything in terms of relations (was Charles Fillmore...)

 

Hi William,

 

It was a pleasure to read the email below. A little “annotation”:

 

Given this, why would one want to insist that the fundamental organization of thought or a universal simple way to express propositions is based on entities, their attributes, and their relationships? +1

 

Regards

 

Sjir Nijssen

 

 

Van: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Namens William Frank
Verzonden: dinsdag 25 februari 2014 15:38
Aan: [ontolog-forum]
Onderwerp: Re: [ontolog-forum] Defining everything in terms of relations (was Charles Fillmore...)

 

 

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 11:10 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Ed, Pat C, William,


.....

WF

> Nothing wrong with the word 'attribute', or the way CHEN and now
> everyone uses it.
>
> EXCEPT FOR Tthe BIG MISTAKE of thinking that a certain kind of  thingie
> (say blue) IS an attribute, just because it **can play that role.**

I agree.  I would use a dyadic relation named HasAttr to relate
an entity to something called an attribute of that entity.

An attribute of something is only an attribute when it is viewed
in the role of the second argument of a relation named 'HasAttr'.

 

Right, I have been saying the following on this forum for almost two years: 

being an attribute is, in human language, not a fixed feature of a word or a concept, except for some of the words in some minority of languages.  In others, 'beauty' and 'beautiful' and 'is beautiful' are expressed with exactly the same word, and the role in the sentence is market either by word position (in a positional language) or a particle that shows this (in a tagged language).  

In a very mongrel language like English, things are very complex, because multiple patterns are in play at the same time, on a word-by-word basis. For example, some words, like 'German', and the same as nouns and adjectives.  He is German, He is A German, while others that occupy the same semantic space, like English and Scottish, are not the same, but have to turn into English Person and Scot. 

 psycholinquists are examining how various language-related disabilities are manifested by speakers of different languages, and thus finding more about what is the same and different about the fundamental samenesses and differences between thinking and speaking in different languages.    They don't use entities, attributes, and relationships as their foundation, nor parts of speech like nouns and verbs.  They tend to use theta roles.

 

Given this, why would one want to insist that the fundamental organization of thought or a universal simple way to express propositions is based on entities, their attributes, and their relationships? +1

 

 

> In another attibutive relation, the same thingie, blue, can play
> the role of attributed to, such as in 'blue is a color.'

This raises the question about instances of blueness.  We'd like to say
the blue of your coat is darker than the blue of the sky.  So we need
to include instances of blueness in the ontology:  the HasAttr relation
relates a coat x to an instance of blueness y, which we can relate to
another instance of blueness z of the sky.

 

Yes, this is yet another role that 'blue' can plan.  It can be the name for a particular repeatable experience of blueness.

The blue of my coat is, if I understand correctly, what some metaphysicians are calling 'tropes' these days.

" According to trope theory, the world consists (wholly or partly) of ontologically unstructured (simple) abstract particulars or, as they are normally called, tropes.  " Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

That is, it is a particular but repeatable experience of blue.   And, in fact, if I understand, in this thought, 'my coat' is there just to locate the blue experience using a shared identifier, becasue the experience of that blueness, along with many other cues, is in fact one of the things that underlies constructing the coat in question out of our fundamental experiences.   Personally, I like this direction for metaphysics, in that it brings it closer to psychophysics and social psychology.   

WF

> Did you ever have clients who had trouble seeing that 'customer'
> was a role, and that so was 'vendor,' so that the vendor and customer
> might be the same company?

Good old Aristotle was quite clear about those issues.  He
distinguished the "substance" -- such as HumanBeing -- from the
"accidents" such as being blue or being a customer, vendor, etc.
For an Aristotelian description of George Washington, see slide 6
of http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/aristo.pdf

 

Yes, and this goes back to some previous discussions here about natural types, with which I also agree. 

But I have found it harder to sell that idea right off the bat than selling the understanding that some words used to describe things are actually describing roles of the things (customer, scoutmaster) , and others are not (person).

Thanks for this, John

Wm 

John

_________________________________________________________________
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
 

_________________________________________________________________
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)