Re: [ontolog-forum] Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO)

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

And, to follow on John's remark, of course the authors of this ontology standard never studied, or at least never learned, any axiomatic mathematics or theory of definition, whereby all defined terms need to be rooted in primitive, undefined, terms, in a partial order with the undefinable primitive terms as the roots. 

The 'meaning' of primitive terms can't be provided in a definition, for obvious reasons.  They are only given p 'meaning' in terms of their use with respect to each other, as specified by the axioms.

As a result, they do not know the difference between:

a definition, whereby a term to be defined, a definiendum, is defined using an _expression_ (the definiens) with which the denifiniedum can be replaced.

an explication, whereby a primitive term is loosely explained in terms of some examples of its use, some of its likely interpretations in other languages, just to give a little more human weight to the intent of the primitive terms.

Clearly, they intended 'thing' to be a primitive term, which means, that ***in their context***, and most of the likely useful ones I can imagine, 'thing' will be undefinable.   But it is not undefinable in and of itself.  It is only in the context of a given axiomatic system that a term used in the system is primitive or defined.  For example, 'or' and 'plus' are primitive in some axiomatizations of Boolean algebra and arithmetic, and not in others.  (I have been told too often that 'or' is 'really' a bunch of nands, whatever really is supposed to mean here.)

I would imagine, though, that they intended to be using other primitive terms, in addition to 'thing'.   Since 'things' are what they want to show in boxes.  I imagine there are some arrows flying around somewhere, too.   

Sadly, after all this time, a new 'standard' that does not regard what you put in a box or what you put on an arrow as a matter of a modelling decision, or a matter of the syntax you use to name the concept (gerunds, lamda operators, etc., anyone?) that is, how you want to CAST the concept, depending on the focus of the domain, but instead still imagines that these syntactic choices and accidents are something **essential** about the very concept.

So, according to standards like this, we can't REcast anything.   Marriage can't be cast as either an event or as a relation, so any relationship between marriage and divorce ceremonies and marriage relationships is purely coincidental.  Moreover, whichever of those two marriage 'really' is, I guess a marriage could certainly never be a 'thing.'   (Before UML, I doubt anyone had invented an artificial language in which it was actually *impossible* for human thought to occur.  Fortunately, people who actually use UML, like me, use the pretty pictures, and try their best to forget about its ontological absurdity, in the unlikely event that they ever were exposed to that dark glass in the first place.) 

Wm

On Sun, Dec 14, 2014 at 3:56 PM, William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I wish words failed me, too.    But my outrage needs some words to go with it.

I am **most** concerned not with how egregiously AWFUL this is, but what it means about the engineering culture in which this could occur. 

There are two disfunctional characteristics that seem to me to be at play here. 

1.Standardize everything first, then use it later, if at all.   No more try before you buy.  Back in pre-history, things like SQL and C were introduced, adopted, then finally turned into standards.  Now, every time somebody has a new idea (or even, as in this case, seems to wish they were having an idea), the FIRST thing they do is to define a 'standard'.

2. Talk (or code) first, learn (or reuse) never.   This subject, as we here all love to yammer on about, has a history more than 2000 years old, about which lots has been learned.  So, the modern day experts on how to effectively stipulate what an ontology will mean by the term 'thing', as well as how to effectively construct defintions,  have a great deal of help from the shoulders on which they stand.   This so-called standard, on the other hand, is like a nightmare of jumbled words that might have popped up in the 2000 years of incremental improvement in our understanding of what is useful to cast as a 'thing', and when.

I am sure the roots of these patterns are economic, as are the roots of most things, but  in the past few millenia of science and engineering, there have been many celebrated endeavors motivated by the desire to increase our understanding of things.  (or maybe, our understanding of  "sets of individuals which are defined according the facts (properties) given for that kind of thing. ")

Although unnecessary, I can't help but repeat Pat's quote from the standard and attack a few of its more obvious failings.   Here is what these people sponsored by the OMG and propose as a standard for the Financial Industry:

"A Thing is defined as the set of individuals which are defined according the facts (properties) given for that kind of thing. "

Well, in general, circular definitions are undesireable. 

So, they have the concept of individual, as a primitive from which Thing is constructed. So, presumably, individuals are NOT things.

Second, they do not distinquish between facts and properties, suggesting that they will have a really hard time when it comes to dealing with the different meta types in the ontology.

The capstone of the absurdity, though, is that in defining thing, they rely on, as part of the definition of thing, the concept of 'KIND of thing.'  How are we to know what a kind of thing is, before we know what a thing is? 

Looking at this some more though, alot of the nonsense in the official semantics for the Unified Modelling Language seems to be embedded here, in that they seem to be making the same fallacy, that individuals and types are so entirely different in nature that we can't even talk about them in the same language.    Of course, the so-called 'semantics' of UML itself has the same disfunctional roots as this stuff does.   Lets make some money for our companies that make tools for O-O languages.

No wonder ontology is not more widely respected, if this is the kind of stuff that happens.


Wm

 

On Sun, Dec 14, 2014 at 2:17 PM, Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx> wrote:

This is hopelessly confused. The technical part of it is nonsense. Just as a sample:

"6.3.3.1 Thing
A Thing is a set theory construct. This is shown on the diagrams as a box with a name. On some diagrams, additional
textual entries in the box show the Simple Properties about that thing.
A Thing is defined as the set of individuals which are defined according the facts (properties) given for that kind of thing. "

Words fail me at this point. How is it possible for educated adult human beings to get themselves so unbelievably muddled over what should be one of the simplest ideas ever stated?

Pat

On Dec 14, 2014, at 12:40 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> A report on the FIBO project:
>
>    http://edmcouncil.org/view/reports/20141121_FIBO_Report_to_Members.pdf
>
> See below for excerpts from the FIBO Semantics Repository Home Page.
>
> John
> ___________________________
>
> Source:  http://www.edmcouncil.org/semanticsrepository/index.html
>
> This website provides a partial report of sections of the Financial
> Industry Business Ontology (FIBO). This is being submitted to the Object
> Management Group (OMG) as a set of proposed standard ontologies under
> the FIBO umbrella. These FIBO OMG specifications are optimized for
> semantic technology applications.
>
> Alongside these we are working to release the full canonical reference
> ontology (as seen in these pages) as RDF/OWL...
>
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