On Wed, 2014-10-22 at 09:57 -0500, Pat Hayes wrote:
> On Oct 22, 2014, at 8:47 AM, William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Cyber Identity has been at the heart of my job for the last three years,
>and identity an interest ever since I wrote my bachelor's thesis on Leibniz
>and Master's thesis on Frege.
> >
> > I agree with you, entirely Hans, and would say that implicit in your
>language is the essence of the problem: 'identity' is a kind of a very ghostly
>abstraction without much mooring. Identity is surely not an attribute of a
>thing. What HAS a mooring is the ACT of identification As you put it Hans,
>"assigning an identity." The act of identification is, as you say, a social
>act, and is of course context dependent.
> >
> > Also, I agree that identification in cyberspace is what creates the the
>acute need for better understanding of identifications.
> > But, it is not an entirely new problem, applications and deeper dives into
>what is already known might suffice.
> >
> > For example, Gary's questions: Is a data object in one format the same as a
>data object in a different format or a different one? The bit streams can
>change but the original identity might be considered the same." This applies
>to *all* human artifacts. When is Moby Dick the 'same' book?
>
> It applies to everything, natural or artificial. When is Iceland the same
>island? How many lakes are there in Norway? It is endemic in the way we use
>language (and probably in how we think about the world.)
>
> > However, a new huge confusion has arisen, the conflating of identifiers
>with identities.
>
> This is also an old problem, but I agree it is a confusion. It is a
>beguilingly natural confusion, since the identifier does define *some*
>identity, but it may not be the identity that readers have in mind (and that
>software built by users implicitly presumes).
>
> > As Gary says, 'seems like a large claim." Worse than large, if people
>think that computers can provide mathematical certainly about things in the
>real world, the assurance that, in effect, a passport MUST be a correct
>indentifier, then we are another step along the way to handing over autocratic
>authority to the machines. Instead of 'we do not have a record of your
>payment'. we go do 'you did not make the payment.'
>
> My credit standing was permanently damaged by the extended fallout from a
>mistyped letter in an address line (W instead of E). Long story, involving
>identity errors of several kinds.
>
> > I am not sure how Jack's point about URIs relates, except that surely, 'to
>be is to be a URI" is another weird way the world might be going. For cyber
>thiings and their identifying characteristics, I would agree with you, Jack.
>But, I also think that identification of *physical* objects might never or not
>for a long time be replicatable with information about the object that can be
>captured on a computer.
>
> In some ways the digital/semantic technologies are making this worse.
>Ontologies impose artificial identity conditions of their own, which can clash
>both with other ontologies and with human intuitions. For example, the widely
>popular provenance ontology http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-primer/ views every
>change as producing a new entity, so changing a tire on a car gives you a new
>car. In contrast, the BFO basic ontology (http://www.ifomis.org/bfo/), used in
>hundreds of bioinformatics applications, enforces a sharp, rigid distinction
>between continuants and occurrents (roughly, objects and processes) with
>completely different identity conditions across time. On the other hand, the
>'oil and gas' (now generalized) ontology ISO 15926, widely used in industry,
>treats everything as what BFO would call an occcurrent. All of these are
>different and mutually incompatible basic assumptions about identity, but
>likely would not even be actively considered by human users (except some
>philosophers, maybe.)
>
> Pat Hayes
>
> >
> > Wm
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 7:22 PM, Jack Park <jackpark@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > I've been importing ontologies into a topic map of late. It's rather
>surprising how many URIs have been assigned to the concept with the label
>"Person".
> >
> > I think it is correct to argue that there are many different ways in which
>some entity is identified by different individuals and communities, so it
>would seem that any "Architecture" which grows up around digital objects --
>which, by many lights, are proxies for subjects one way or another-- should be
>capable of capturing all knowable ways to identify that object, regardless of
>the database identifier assigned to it locally.
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 3:24 PM, Hans Polzer <hpolzer@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Gary,
> >
> >
> >
> > I tend to agree with your musings. The issue of identity (of whatever
>entity) is certainly one that the network revolution has brought to increased
>importance, if for no other reason than that it exposes the identities that
>anyone assigns to an entity/object, be it digital or “real world” to those
>who may assign a different identity to that same entity/object, however
>“sameness” might be defined. The NCOIC Net Centric Principles grappled
>with this issue by means of a principle called “Entity Primacy”, which
>basically states that whatever identity you might assign to an entity/object,
>it has other identities in other, usually collective, frames of reference.
>Deal with that, as opposed to assuming that the identity you assigned has
>primacy. Usually that would mean recognizing that the entity/object has other
>identities in other frames of reference, and one should be prepared to map the
>locally assigned identity to one or more other identities in other frames of
>reference, presumably those used by actors with whom one might want to
>exchange information about said entity/object.
> >
> >
> >
> > Of course, one could argue that any entity/object has some “natural” or
>“inherent” identity, such as the PID referenced below, UUID’s (Universal
>Unique Identifiers), or a person’s DNA, or perhaps more pragmatically, the
>VIN of an automobile. But even these assume a context of some, usually
>implicit, scope and an associated frame of reference. In other words, such an
>identity is inherently one of the collective within which the entity/object is
>being identified. Entity Primacy therefore points out that no collective
>context has a priori primacy for assigning identities to entities/objects. One
>needs to specify which collective context a particular identity for an
>entity/object is based on/derived from. And yes, this is recursive, since such
>collective contexts for assigning identities will themselves have identities
>in, presumably, larger contexts.
> >
> >
> >
> > Humans just tend to glom onto some collective context (such as DNS) and
>assume that everyone else will simply use that collective context for
>identifying entities, forgetting that not everything uses DNS, even in the
>networking domain. PIDs would certainly help things – but they are not
>universal and they likely assume some representational context dimensions, as
>you surmise in your email. That’s OK as long as one is explicit about what
>those are and understand the scope limitations that they imply when
>interacting with others who might not share those assumptions.
> >
> >
> >
> > Hans
> >
> >
> >
> > From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Gary Berg-Cross
> > Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2014 5:39 PM
> > To: [ontolog-forum]
> > Subject: [ontolog-forum] "Data/digital Object" Identities
> >
> >
> >
> > There is a bit of a movement to discuss digital data in terms of Digital
>Objects and an "Architecture." One rationale for this seems to be to provide
>an easier mechanism for the "creation of, and access to, digital objects as
>discrete data structures with unique, resolvable identifiers" - From a
>CNRI’s Press Release.
> >
> > It is further argued that such Digital Objects with a persistent ID (PID)
>will "provide a foundation for representing and interacting with information
>on the Internet."
> >
> > Seems like a large claim and I wonder what this community thinks of this
>idea. After all Identity is quite a semantic issue and intuitions about
>identities for digital objects might cause some problems. They seem quite
>mutable and we'd need to distinguish the ID for the raw data from each
>processing version of it. Is a data object in one format the same as a data
>object in a different format or a different one? The bit streams can change
>but the original identity might be considered the same.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Gary Berg-Cross, Ph.D.
> >
> > gbergcross@xxxxxxxxx
> >
> > http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?GaryBergCross
> >
> > NSF INTEROP Project
> >
> > http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0955816
> >
> > SOCoP Executive Secretary
> >
> > Independent Consultant
> >
> > Potomac, MD
> >
> > 240-426-0770
> >
> >
> >
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