Joel Luis, Bruce, and Gian Piero, (01)
This thread gets into a huge number of issues. I'd like to relate
them to a 5-day course that I taught on "Patterns of Logic and
Ontology": http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/patolog1.pdf (02)
Slide 3 of lecture 4 (copy below) raises the issue of descriptive
ontologies (i.e., empirical science) vs. normative ontologies
(i.e., standards, conventions, policies, and project designs). (03)
Whenever anybody proposes an ontology, you have to ask what problem
it was designed to solve. Is it intended as a scientific theory?
An engineering theory for constructing something? A standard for
a wide range of projects? A basis for natural language semantics?
Who are the intended users? What will they do with it? How? Why? (04)
A scientific theory is always descriptive and always *fallible*.
An engineering theory is an approximation to some scientific theory
that is sufficient (within the tolerances of the measuring methods)
for some application or range of applications. (05)
If it's designed for NLP, what is the subject, genre, application?
How general does it need to be? Is there some standard or widely
used terminology for that field? (06)
Joel Luis
> I found the approach proposed by Giancarlo Guizzardi, very interesting.
> http://www.inf.ufes.br/~gguizzardi/quaEntities.pdf
> His approach was included in the so called Unified Foundational
> Ontology (UFO): http://doc.utwente.nl/50826/1/thesis_Guizzardi.pdf (07)
Bruce
> Giancarlo Guizzardi is a poet as well as a philosopher and a scientist.
> He has a brilliant instinct for simple articulate clarity.
>
> his entire thesis addresses this charming concern with high precision
> and balance...
>
> “In summary, the position defended here subscribes to Mylopoulos.
> dictum (Mylopoulos, 1992) that .[t]he adequacy of a conceptual modelling
> notation rests on its contribution to the construction of models of
> reality that promote a common understanding of that reality among their
> human users..” (08)
I agree that Giancarlo's thesis is interesting and good of its kind.
But I would ask the above questions: What problem(s) does it address?
Is it intended to be descriptive (for science, engineering, NLP) ? (09)
Or is it intended to be normative (standard)? If so, who would use
it? For what kinds of projects or purposes? How? Why? (010)
The quotation by Mylopoulos (who has worked on problems in
databases and knowledge bases for many years) suggests that he
intended it for knowledge sharing. But as slide 2 of patalog4.pdf
shows, the results have not been promising. For about 100+ URLs
of related projects since 1980, see http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl (011)
Whenever anybody proposes YAFO (Yet Another Formal Ontology), I
always ask: How does it compare to Cyc? They have been working
on Cyc and OpenCyc for over 30 years with many very good logicians,
philosophers, linguists, and computer scientists as consultants.
In what way does your system solve problems that they haven't solved? (012)
I don't believe that Cyc is ideal, and I recognize that it has not
been as successful as they had hoped. But anybody who proposes YAFO
must explain why they claim that in X years they developed a better
solution than Cyc did in 1000 person-years of R & D. (013)
I do not believe that a universal YAFO is possible or desirable.
But I believe that some partial YAFOs can be useful for some purposes.
And I think that a multiplicity of YAFOs is better than one. (014)
Gian Piero
> the usual criticisms as, first of all, the unnecessary multiplication
> of individuals. (015)
What do you mean by 'individuals'? Do you mean entities in the
physical universe? Ways of talking about entities? Or more general
signs (icons, indexes, and symbols of aspects of the universe)? (016)
When you talk about large animals, the ways of counting them are
fairly clear. But even for human beings, the boundary between the
animal and the environment is very uncertain. For other living
things the boundaries are extremely uncertain. A hundred Aspen
trunks, for example, may be counted as 1 individual or 100 individuals
-- either way, the boundaries are very uncertain. (017)
For nonliving things, all bets are off. The Ship of Theseus is one
of the *simpler* puzzles. In logic and mathematics, identity conditions
are very sharp and clear. But when you want to apply logic and math
to the world, everything is uncertain, arbitrary, and ad hoc. (018)
In science and engineering, identity is *never* observable.
Similarity is observable, and identity is *always* an inference. (019)
For more about these issues, http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.pdf (020)
John
_______________________________________________________________________ (021)
Slide 3 of http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/patolog4.pdf (022)
RELATING MULTIPLE ONTOLOGIES (023)
The lack of consensus is inevitable.
● Different applications, different fields, different requirements.
● General-purpose systems require multiple paradigms.
● Many logics, many reasoning methods, many ontologies. (024)
Descriptive ontology is always fallible:
● Describes the concepts of empirical sciences and everyday life.
● Must accommodate anything anyone observes or does.
● Changes with every new discovery or theory. (025)
Normative ontology is only true by convention:
● Specifies detailed conventions for specific fields or applications.
● Changes with every new policy, invention, or innovation. (026)
For interoperability among heterogeneous systems,
● An underspecified, descriptive upper level ontology.
● Open-ended variety of descriptive or normative microtheories. (027)
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