Re: [ontolog-forum] Prospects made into Customers and Vice Versa

[Thomas Johnston <tmj44p@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Rich,

For naming database tables, what the English language says is irrelevant or, at best, nothing more than suggestive. The table Customer for division A is whatever division A says it is, and so too for division B. 

"Customer" is a name that each division gives to a table it has. If they wanted to call the table "XYZ", there is no reason why they can't. The table, and its set membership criteria, are one thing; the name given to it is something else.

The tables -- the one for A and the one for B -- if they are relational tables, are sets. As sets, they have set membership criteria which say which, for all the possible persons who might be or become customers, what criteria they have to meet to become customers, and to remain customers. And as I said, across a couple of dozen clients, I have never found any two of them who had Customer tables with exactly the same set membership criteria.

And, to look at it from the opposite end of things, suppose A and B did define their tables, in set membership terms, identically, but that A called its table a "Customer" table and B called its table an "Obligated Party" table. The different names wouldn't matter. The two tables would still be identical.

This is an example of one of the important things ontologies can do. They can tell us when two identical names are homonyms and, conversely, when two different names are synonyms.

If you are worried about the "customer" vs. "prospect" distinction in ordinary English, let me change the example. Let's say that for division A, someone stops being a customer if they haven't purchased anything in the last three years; but for division B, someone stops being a customer if they haven't purchased anything in the last two years. Surely no English dictionary would say that either or both of these rules created an "untruth".

And note the most important point. These are differences which make a difference. Even though both tables are given the name "Customer", they mean different things. A SQL Count statement against the two tables, to decide which division had the most customers, could not provide an answer, because the statement will be counting different definitions of "customer". The statement will be counting apples and oranges.

Reading up on dictionaries will not solve this problem. First, as I said, dictionaries are irrelevant. Secondly, no ordinary language dictionary would ever provide a definition accurate enough to tell us what rules have to be satisfied for somebody to be represented in any Customer table.

This is what we need a true Semantic Web for. We can't just look for tables in different databases that have the same name, to know we will be accessing tables that represent the same things. Two tables represent the "same things" if and only if (i) they share a universe of discourse, and (ii) they use identical set membership criteria to partition that universe of discourse into things that aren't represented in those tables and things that are.

Tom

On Saturday, October 24, 2015 12:12 PM, Rich Cooper <metasemantics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear Tom

 

I would like to recapitulate your example of the company that has two divisions A and B.  B treats all prospects as customers while A distinguishes customers as those who have actually bought something in the past. 

 

The boss tells A division mgrs to up the customer count. So the A boss has the distinction changed so that people who have NEVER bought, but who are known by A, are now treated as customers just like the B division mgrs do it. 

 

While that change seems very normal and natural for a business to do that in trying to wrap its processes around the tax and risk constraints it has to deal with, it also seems like an untruth, since the English language says Prospects are not the same as Customers. 

 

How do you philosophers in the crowd deal with that kind of change of definition into something every business knows is just plain incorrect?

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper,

Rich Cooper,

 

Chief Technology Officer,

MetaSemantics Corporation

MetaSemantics AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

( 9 4 9 ) 5 2 5-5 7 1 2

http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com

 

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