Re: [ontology-summit] Large-scale engineered systems vs. large-scale soc

To:	Ontology Summit 2011 discussion <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From:	Gary Berg-Cross <gbergcross@xxxxxxxxx>
Date:	Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:07:46 -0500
Message-id:	<CAMhe4f1J_D_iBf7UPYk2R9PZqhJ_yL2Ys5yGAGW1wBaF3WpbZA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

JackR. I’m not sure I follow your appeal to an auto accident and its description.

One starting one for this part of the thread was your statement:

> My point is that the very act of assigning the label, system, to natural phenomenon is arrogant ---- until we have an ontology of system.

It would be nice to have such an ontology, but we don’t have to wait for one to have a discussion and see what conceptualization makes sense. Science has been helping us undestand the world for quite a while.

You later used a caterpillar example, which would involve an evolved object that is part of nature. I could pursue that example but since I think of many aspects of nature as systemic I used Wetlands as an example. Here are some of the ways that I think that it qualifies as an class or instance of system looking at the share common characteristics I used:

Wetlands like systems have structure. So it has by components/elements like ground water, low areas, vegetation components. These have composition as much as any description of an auto accident.

As a system it has behavior, which involves inputs of rain or flow water, processing (water seepage, movement etc.) and outputs of material as when some of the water flows to a lake or the sea.

A wetlands shows interconnectivity as well as the parts of a car. Groundwater interacts with surface water in nearly all landscapes, ranging from small streams, lakes, and wetlands in headwater areas to major river valleys and seacoasts.

The various parts of a wetlands such as high parts and low have functional as well as structural relationships to each other. Thus topographically high areas are generally groundwater recharge areas and topographically low areas are groundwater discharge areas.

Wetlands may have some functions/processes like evaporation and transpiration. So hydrologic processes associated with the surface-water bodies themselves, such as seasonally high surface-water levels and evaporation and transpiration of groundwater from around the perimeter of surface-water bodies, are a major cause of the complex and seasonally dynamic groundwater flow fields associated with surface water.

So I say it stacks up (or more than stacks up) to the framework of characteristics.

So I think of a wetlands as a system.

Gary Berg-Cross, Ph.D.

gbergcross@xxxxxxxxx

http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?GaryBergCross

NSF INTEROP Project

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SOCoP Executive Secretary

Knowledge Strategies

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240-426-0770

On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 4:37 PM, Jack Park <jackpark@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jack,

Does a caterpillar have to tell anybody anything to otherwise be a
part of a larger system, be it engineered or sociotechnical, natural,
or otherwise? How is that question related to the subject?

JackP

On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 12:15 PM, Jack Ring <jring7@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Gary,
> Has any caterpillar ever told you he is going to become a butterfly?
> On Jan 19, 2012, at 1:13 PM, gbergcross@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>> Jack....Wow.
>>
>> I do think of MUCH of natural phenomena as part of a system of related parts, which allows emergence from thise parts, for example.
>>
>> Gary

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