Dear Matthew, Leo, Pat, Mike, and Kingsley, (01)
These discussions show what happens when terms derived from informal
usage are adopted as technical terms in science and engineering. (02)
MW
> ['Entity' is a] perfectly good name, and my preference, but I would
> certainly never try to mandate its use. (03)
As people who are involved with standards, we are trying to define
useful norms. But we should emphasize the distinction between the
formalism and the informal terminology that anyone might prefer. (04)
A symbol I prefer to any word is ⊤ (⊤ in HTML). It's used
for the top node of a lattice. In my KR book, I recommended 'Entity'
as a pronounceable synonym for ⊤. (05)
The symbol for the bottom of a lattice is ⊥ (⊥), which also
has no pronounceable synonym. But I use the term 'absurd type'
to emphasize that nothing of type ⊥ can exist. Many ontologies
have definitions that unintentionally imply ⊥. (06)
Leo
> I would also suggest this shouldn’t be another opportunity to bash
> OWL and the Semantic Web. We must be focused on good content, yes,
> but also be pragmatic and effective. (07)
I very strongly agree. And so would Pat. (08)
PH
> I have no outrage myself, only weariness, but after a decade of
> giving my efforts to the W3C pro bono, I am no longer willing to
> contribute to the greater good by teaching basic semantics to
> committees of people who are ignorant of the foundations of the
> subject they profess to be practicing. (09)
As for OWL, my primary complaint is about the word 'the' in
"the web ontology language". Tim B-L's DAML proposal in 2000
was far and away superior to what was provided in 2005. That's
typical for any ambitious proposal. (010)
The IKRIS project we were working on in 2005 and 2006 had people
who understood the issues. It was closer to being a direct response
to Tim's proposal than the DAML project. Unfortunately, the funding
for IKRIS was not continued, and the SW stagnated at the 2005 stage. (011)
For the official IKRIS reports and 20 other documents and slides,
see http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl/ (012)
In the historical section, I include a pointer to Matt Ginsberg's
1991 article on "The KIF of Death". When Mike Genesereth and I
were working on the standards for KIF and conceptual graphs, we
considered Matt's complaints an annoyance. (013)
But Matt's alternative to KIF was a rough outline of a simple FOL
core with extensibility options. He didn't provide enough detail
in that article, but his goals were close to what IKL produced. (014)
I recommend the historical documents in http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl/ (015)
MB
> I came down on the side of "Thing"... [because] 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. (016)
I sympathize. By adopting the term 'conceptual graph', I created
a pit that many people fell into. So I had to emphasize that in
the formalism a concept is nothing more nor less than a node in
a graph. All the meaning comes from what we do with those graphs. (017)
KI
> In my experience "Entity" is better than "Thing" especially, when
> discussing matters with a technical audience... an ontology should
> be constructed for an audience that can understand its technical
> underpinnings. Alternative approaches always lead to problems. (018)
I agree. It's essential to distinguish the foundation from the
tutorials -- and *especially* from the advertising and PR hype. (019)
One way to do that is to have short, succinct definitions with
formal symbols like ⊤ (⊤) and ⊥ (⊥). The formalism
should use an absolute *minimum* of NL words of any kind. (020)
But we also need humanly readable terminology and diagrams. I like
the use of UML in FIBO. But the standard should emphasize that the
formal spec's take precedence over informal terminology or diagrams.
It's important to emphasize the difference. (021)
John (022)
_________________________________________________________________
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 (023)
|