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Re: [ontology-summit] categorizing "ontology"

To: "Ontology Summit 2007 Forum" <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "tom beckman" <tombeckman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2007 11:41:35 -0500
Message-id: <037001c73be8$afc8eaa0$0a00a8c0@bipper>
Dear John,    (01)

Perhaps you might help me understand how logic (or most other upper 
ontologies for that matter) can describe and reason about inexact 
"real-world" concept/attribute values while retaining its mathematical 
correctness.  For many domains and problems, it would seem that 
similarity/case-based reasoning is a better representational choice.  I am 
also puzzled by absence of mechanisms in all of these upper ontology systems 
to describe the importance of an attribute and to measure the certainty of a 
value.  It would seem to me that any robust reasoning system would require 
representation of these features to have realistically high performance.    (02)

Best, Tom    301-920-0715    (03)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Ontology Summit 2007 Forum" <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2007 9:39 AM
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] categorizing "ontology"    (04)


>I realize that the ODM document is the result of a lot of
> very hard work, but what I find depressing about all such
> efforts is that they get lost in syntactic detail.
>
> Syntax is certainly important for readability and usability,
> but the purpose of Common Logic is to eliminate syntax from
> consideration when analyzing the options for interchange of
> semantics from one notation to another.
>
> All of the languages in the ODM report can be translated to
> Common Logic.  When that is done, all syntactic issues are
> eliminated, and it is possible to examine exactly which
> aspects of logic each source language can or cannot support.
>
> People often complain that logic is hard to understand, but
> logic is actually an extremely simple subset of the language
> people use every day.  Just the following words in normal
> English syntax provides the full power of Common Logic:
>
>    and, or, not, if-then, some, every, equals
>
> If you throw arithmetic and sets into the ontology, you get
> everything that is present in any of those languages listed
> in the ODM document.
>
> Names are certainly important, but any naming scheme ever
> invented can be adopted and used in English or logic.
>
> That's all there is to first-order logic. You can add the word
> "that" in order to support metalanguage for using logic to talk
> about any other language, including logic itself.  And you can
> add some modal words -- may, can, must, shall -- if you want
> to use modal logic (which can be defined in terms of FOL plus
> the word "that" for metalanguage).
>
> The complexity results from the option of using and reusing
> those basic words in all possible combinations.  But the
> foundation is extremely simple.
>
> John Sowa
>
>
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