Dear Paul, (01)
Apologies for the previous empty reply...my mail agent got the better of me. (02)
On Wed, 2014-10-22 at 09:57 -0500, Pat Hayes wrote: (03)
> 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.) (04)
Would not then prudence suggest we consider alternative approaches that
might have a better chance of meeting human needs?
[MW>] This is what we try to do, at least in ISO 15926. So, why it is
rigorously 4D, we use that rigorous framework to identify the things
ordinary humans recognise. So whilst everything is an occurrent, we have
relatively cuddly things like physical_object (like a car with a new tyre is
still the same car - some parts can change without affecting identity) and
set that in a rigorous framework (there is a continuing car, and there is a
state of the car with the old tyre and a state of the car with the new car). (05)
These and other apparently insuperable difficulties discussed in this forum
all seem to arise from systems based on mathematical logic. Is it possible
our faith in mathematical logic as an ultimate aid to human knowledge and
reasoning is misplaced?
[MW>] This actually has relatively little to do with logic, except that
logic can be used to make many of the statements, and rather more to do with
philosophical ontology, which is present, even when we try to ignore it. (06)
Regards (07)
Matthew West
Information Junction
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Regards,
--Paul (09)
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