Re: [ontolog-forum] The Denizens of an Ontology Was: Financial Industry

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

John and Pat, and all:

It is for the reasons you both discuss below that I have frequently used the word 'thingie' in this forum, to refer to anything we might find described in an ontology.

(But then, I have been (even self) described more than once as a 'food fight of the mind', especially when my closest colleague was a 'tea ceremony of the mind.')

My trouble with 'entity', like Pat's, is that it carries all * kinds* of technical baggage, as 'thing' carries ordinary language baggage.

And, for many, not everything is a 'thing'.  

What about events (things that happen), like getting married, policies, (things that control what happens), like how many people can be married to each other) associations, (like being married) the roles of things in associations, (like husband), and the ontology rules that relate such categories of thinghood to each other, and what about the propositions that express relationships among such things, including the relationships between such propositions and other kinds ontololgical denizens, such as 'John Believes that p.' What about functions and algorithms?

Some, like me, want to see sets of things treated as more things.

For me, I see ***all of these** as legitimate denizens of an ontology, even ones that most people would not think of as either things or entities.  In fact, in general, I think that ontology has focussed far to much on thinghood, things that are reffered to in English with nouns, when I see no primacy except for a cultural/linguistic predilection toward nouns, among things that happen, like rain, vs. things given identities, like hurricanes,  etc. 

More subtly, there are a bunch of nice writings  in philosophical ontology on Stuff and Things'.   Water vs raindrops.   How the syntax of different languages draws the distinction in different places, (hair in English vs. hairs in French) and in a single language makes the distinction for differently with respect to different subjects (rice vs. beans).   (some people, I know, think they 'solve' this 'problem' by saying Water is a distributed entity, constituting all the water in the world.   That works if you start out with the presumption that everything has to be thing-like).

I like 'thingie' because I think we should have child like fun.  For example, I love personas like Pricilla Project Manager for stakeholders in user stories.  But for many, childlike is childish, and it is indeed hard to keep the two separate. 

But more generally, to have any possibly **meaningful NAME** at all for the single root that everything in the ontology includes is, as John is suggesting, I believe, entirely counter-productive.   Most of us are aquainted with the dictum that a description that applies to every possible thing is vacuuous, whether we attribute this to Shannon, or Wittgenstein, or Aristotle.   

And, while I think that most of us agree with Dennis Wisnoski that any claim to have the *one right* way to do this is wrong, and so arguing about which is the 'right' is similar to the (misunderstood) angels on the head of a pin argument (that example was originally posed by great thinkers to illustrate what has since been called a 'category mistake.), it remains that *some* clear, concise, consistent, foundation for an ontology is a good idea, and that there is alot of easily available knowledge out there that ANY ontology should acknowledge, as Pat suggests, such as the difference between a fact and a property, the theory of definition, and the difference between a formal definition and what we find in dictionaries, etc.    

So, I would propose that if we want a root in our ontology tree, (which is itself an unnecessary constraint), I would simple call it 'root'.  Better I would put a BOX around everything, and label the box 'universe of discourse'.  (The problem with the 'root idea is that people want to read the up pointing arrows 'is a kind of', and that does not work for 'root', unless we explicate 'root' as 'anything we are able to talk about, think about, experience, name, and therefore that we could identify* --  or something along those lines.

*(but this brings up more UML silliness that seems to have invaded all of computer science, such as 'numbers don't have an identity.'  Identity and identifiers being yet another thing that great minds have wrestled with and pinned pretty well to the mat in the last 3000 years, which knowledge seems to be fading away, as the experts argue about the angel-details and everybody else walks away.)

Wm

On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 12:43 PM, Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On Dec 15, 2014, at 7:54 AM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Dear Matthew, William, and Adrian,
>
> MW
>> “The term THING means the same as the word thing.” This is not
>> actually circular. The terms in your ontology are in principle
>> labels without any inherent meaning at all.   Try telling
>> a computer otherwise.
>
> I agree.  But that is a primary reason why we should *STOP* using
> the label 'Thing' for the top of an ontology.  The quoted comment
> means nothing to a computer, but people who know nothing about
> logic get the hopelessly misleading idea that it means something.
>
> As Pat Hayes noted, there's huge amount of confusion about ontology
> in nearly every published ontology.  FIBO is an example, but nearly
> all the others are just as bad or worse.
>
> People who should know better have been using the label 'Thing' for
> the top of an ontology because it gives a "comfy feeling" to those
> who know nothing about logic.

I have recommended its use (to TimBL and others) instead of the outlandish term "resource" which has become the accepted terminology in W3C circles.

> But that is an open invitation to *DISASTER*.  Don't ever give
> people a comfy feeling about something they don't understand.
>
> That is why I recommend the label 'Entity'.  It alerts the readers
> that they're stepping outside the realm of comfy words into highly
> technical terminology.

Unfortunately, XML has already co-opted that word for an entirely different technical usage, one that is known to so many people in the Web world that its use here would be hopelessly confusing.

In spite of the comfiness danger you note, it is hard to do better than "Thing" for the top node name, IMO. But one should emphasise that this really does mean ANY thing, including things that you, the reader, have never thought of (but other people have thought, or will think, of.) The Horatio principle becomes relevant at this point.

> It's not hard to tell people that the word 'entity' means
> "anything that exists or may exist".  But as William and Adrian
> noted, that is *not* how the word 'thing' is used in English:
>
> WF


Pat H

> Before we can teach people ontology, we have to *STOP* giving
> them a comfy feeling that they already know ontology.
>
> 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
>
>

------------------------------------------------------------
IHMC                                     (850)434 8903 home
40 South Alcaniz St.            (850)202 4416   office
Pensacola                            (850)202 4440   fax
FL 32502                              (850)291 0667   mobile (preferred)
phayes@xxxxxxx       http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes

_________________________________________________________________
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)