On 12/16/14 9:19 AM, Mike Bennett wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> As it happens, there was a conversation about "Thing" versus "Entity" on
> this very forum at the time I was thinking about what words to use.
>
> I came down on the side of "Thing" for the following reasons:
>
> 1. I wanted to make it explicitly clear to any reader of the model, that
> this was not "Yet Another Data Model" but a model of real things.
> Sometimes it helps to call upon the Ango-Saxon language for words that
> have not been muddied by previous usages. I had previously tried to
> present computationally independent models of concepts without doing
> this, and the result was always that they were reviewed as though they
> were data models. How to make it clear that the model is intended to be
> a model of real things in the world? A new, untainted word was required.
>
> 2. I decided to use the OWL language, against the advice from many
> well-informed folks including yourself, because we needed something
> which was recognized in the technology community and which would have
> tooling going forward, and because the OWL language, having "Thing" at
> the top, made it explicitly clear that it was a model of things in the
> world and not a model of someone's data. So it matched my instinct to
> use the word "Thing" as above.
>
> 3. The word "Entity" which you proposed at the time, while more
> precisely correct, suffered from the problem which Pat notes in a later
> email, namely that it has a well-worn meaning in the data modeling
> world. The last thing we needed was something that could be mistaken for
> a model of database "entities".
>
> Of course the word "Thing" is often interpreted as being a concrete,
> continuant, independent thing. To get around this, we made sure that
> everything in the model was framed in terms of three sets of partitions:
> Independent Thing / Relative Thing / Mediating Thing; Continuant Thing /
> Occurrent Thing; and Concrete / Abstract. By appending the word "Thing"
> to those, it is hopefully clearer that the term "Thing" at the top of
> the model encompasses all of those, and not simply those things you can
> poke with a stick. (01)
Hi Mike, (02)
Assuming I have the right version, I have a FIBO viewing page [1] that
could assist everyone in this burgeoning debate. Thus far, in regards to
definitions of the *nature* of entities and relations described by this
ontology, I am not seeing the owl:Thing anomaly [2]. (03)
In my experience "Entity" is better than "Thing" especially, when
discussing matters with a technical audience. Personally, an Ontology
should be constructed for an audience that can understand its technical
underpinnings. Alternative approaches always lead to problems. (04)
An few aesthetic tweak suggestions for FIBO: (05)
1. Class Names should start with upper case and phrases should be CamelCase
2. Property Names should be in lower case and camelCase re., phrases. (06)
The above makes a world of difference, it even aids those who are
encountering ontologies (for the first time) from other realms e.g.,
RDBMS and DBMS folks in general. (07)
Links: (08)
[1] http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/c/8JZYHP -- FIBO overview via a
LInked Data browser
[2] http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/c/8JZX7W -- FIBO autonomous agent
subsumption tree root . (09)
--
Regards, (010)
Kingsley Idehen
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Personal Weblog 1: http://kidehen.blogspot.com
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Personal WebID: http://kingsley.idehen.net/dataspace/person/kidehen#this (011)
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