ontolog-forum
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [ontolog-forum] The "qua-entities" paradigm

To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Gian Piero Zarri <zarri@xxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2015 13:09:19 +0200
Message-id: <556D8EDF.7000200@xxxxxxx>
Dear Bruce,    (01)

I reply to the original mail, given that your subsequent discussion with 
John Sowa goes well-beyond the original "qua-entity" topic.    (02)

I agree completely with you that the so-called "counting problem" is not 
conceptually too difficult to solve, and I think that the "qua-entity" 
solution the SW people have imagined to solve this "problem" is 
equivalent to cracking a nut with a sledgehammer. Moreover, the 
proliferation of "individuals" associated with that solution is in 
patent contradiction with the Occam's principle proscribing the 
multiplication of entities without necessity.    (03)

Reducing the problem to the relationships between two tables is, 
however, a little bit simplistic. To be complete, you should in fact 
multiply your tables to take into account also the spatio-temporal 
information, the circumstances of the flights, the modalities, the 
interactions among the protagonists of the flying events, and so on. Not 
too long ago, well-known data base specialists denied any interest to 
the knowledge representation discipline saying that a well-designed 
relational DB system could solve any possible representational problem. 
Trying, however, to model everything as "flat tables" often leads to 
awkward database design and to unnecessarily complicated queries. "Good" 
and "expressive" knowledge representation systems are today still 
particularly necessary - of course, not those in the "qua-entities" style.    (04)

Best regards,    (05)


G.P. Zarri    (06)




Le 01/06/2015 18:45, Bruce Schuman a écrit :
>> With this ontology, multiple "passenger" events can be recognized as
> temporal parts of the same "person" process.
>
> Hmmm.  What am I missing here...?  Must be a lot.
>
> Maybe this isn't a universal approach, or overlooks something important, but
> from the point of view of simple database design, all this issue seems to
> require is a database table of unique individual people -- with a list of
> descriptors/attributes adequate for whatever the purposes might be, and
> another database table of "flights".
>
> Every passenger (with their check-list of attributes or tags) has a unique
> ID number, and so do the flights.  Associated with every flight is the list
> of passengers.
>
> For me -- a "person" is an irreducible object with any number of attributes
> (that may or may not be transient -- and yes, maybe "duplicates" are a
> problem).  A "flight" is (or would seem to be) a well-defined object or
> class.  This complexity looks to me like nothing more than a simple
> many-to-one mapping (many people from the "people" table mapped to 1 flight,
> where they become "passengers")
>
> I guess I am following Russell's definition:
>
> "The thing-property ontology, which Russell (1918) pushed to the extreme of
> treating objects as nothing but "a bundle of properties," is derived from
> the substance-property-accident representation of Aristotle's early
> philosophy."
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.pdf
>
> But this is so obvious, I must be grossly underestimating something or
> missing some huge point.  Sorry if this is a mindlessly trivial comment.
>
> - Bruce Schuman
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa
> Sent: Sunday, May 31, 2015 10:12 PM
> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] The "qua-entities" paradigm
>
> Leo and Gian Piero,
>
> Leo
>> Krifka, Manfred. 1990. "Four Thousand Ships Passed Through The Lock:
>> Object-Induced Measure Functions on Events". Linguistics and
>> Philosophy
>> 13 (1990), 487-520.
> Gian Piero
>> Thanks for telling me about [Krifka's paper] - even if, in my humble
>> opinion, a complex formal analysis is not really necessary to deal
>> with this topic.
> I agree that the paper is (a) interesting, but (b) far more complex than it
> should be.  It has 34 pages of formalism -- see below for excerpts that show
> why it's so complex.
>
> I agree with Matthew that a 4D system can simplify many descriptions.
> That is the basis for Whitehead's process ontology:
>
>    1. Mereology + 4D space-time
>
>    2. Processes are fundamental, with events as spatial and temporal
>       parts of processes.
>
>    3. Objects are slowly changing processes that are sufficiently
>       stable that repeated events can be recognized as parts of
>       the same process.
>
> With this ontology, multiple "passenger" events can be recognized as
> temporal parts of the same "person" process.
>
> Whitehead's ontology is far more compatible with modern science than any
> ontology that takes macroscopic objects as primitive.
>
> Rescher wrote a very good critique of the object-based ontologies by Quine,
> Strawson, and others.  For a summary with references, see pp. 5 and 6 of
> http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.pdf
>
> John
> _______________________________________________________________________
>
> http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/s07/events/krifka90.pdf
>
> [The solution] is couched in a more general framework for the semantics of
> mass nouns, count nouns, measure constructions, and temporal constitution
> (i.e., aspectual classes), which was developed in Krifka (1986, to appear).
> This framework takes on the one hand the treatment of mass nouns and plural
> nouns in an algebraic (lattice-theoretic) semantics, as developed by Link
> (1983), and the event semantics developed by Davidson (1967) and Parsons
> (1980) on the other (cf.
> Hinrichs, 1985; Bach, 1986; Link, 1987; and Lasersohn, 1988 for related
> approaches). Furthermore, it combines them with notions developed in the
> theory of measurement...
>
> In Section (3), I will present two versions of this analysis, the second of
> which is semantically somewhat more complicated, but more in agreement with
> the syntactic structure...
>
> In Section (4), I will go into some cases which seem to pose special
> problems for at least one of the two analyses - namely, coordination,
> quantifiers, comparison, anaphora, and phase nouns. Finally, I will argue
> that the event-related readings of our examples are a special case of a more
> common phenomenon, which in general can be described as the extension of
> measure functions from one domain to another...
>   
> _________________________________________________________________
> 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
>       (07)


_________________________________________________________________
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    (08)

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>