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Re: [ontology-summit] The tools are not the problem (yet)

To: Ontology Summit 2014 discussion <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Barkmeyer, Edward J" <edward.barkmeyer@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2014 00:38:48 +0000
Message-id: <8fb38d30ef394fb7913e29386fc08fe5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

John,

 

I think you got an earlier version of the SBVR spec.  The “preferred terms” were changed in v1.1, because many people in someone’s intended audience for SBVR recognized fact-type, etc., as terms in the ORM language, whose primary use is database design, and these folk were all about vocabularies, and wanted to distance themselves from that.  (But v1.0 in 2008 was heavily influenced by the “ORM faction” out of DAMA.)  (But now that I think of it, the publication of v1.1 was delayed by nearly 2 years by tooling problems.)

 

The current version is v1.2, from last fall:  http://www.omg.org/spec/SBVR/1.2.

 

-Ed

 

From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John McClure
Sent: Monday, February 03, 2014 4:23 PM
To: ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] The tools are not the problem (yet)

 

Ed,
Thank you for raising SBVR as a source of wisdom; this substantial body of work directly supports my critique of most ontologies on the semantic web whether used for Big Data exercises or not. You mentioned SBVR's 'verb concepts' (well, you called them 'verb concept symbols') -- this term is a formal synonym in SBVR for 'fact types'. Its Annex C, SBVR Structured English states clearly that verbs are used "for designations for fact types — usually a verb, preposition, or combination thereof". Even a cursory examination of SBVR's axioms shows their rigorous use of verbs, auxiliaries and prepositions for predicates. No nouns, though, please note.

Again, my diagnosis is that an unbridled use of nouns within/as predicates causes (a) modelling problems (b) reuse problems (c) SME stakeholdership problems. This disease ("nomine praedicato") is present in many RDF ontologies and in certain FOL ontologies like Cyc Dolce et al, several referenced as exemplary ("serving as a desirable model; representing the best of its kind") by wise ones in this forum. I've tried to present this diagnosis in terms I thought would directly resonate with FOL/CL folks who live here, but the pushback feels to me furious!

As you know, I have (shared) some solutions I'm finding work well in a semantic wiki environment, but we need to agree on what the problems are first to really get into evaluating alternative solutions. If everyone thinks my analysis is way off-base, fine, I'm invested in hearing others' diagnoses (concerning why there is so little reuse/development of ontologies) including "poor tools" which, quite possibly to me alone, are merely band-aid treatments for the disorder nomine praedicato.

/jmc
PS "is part of" is not a defined SBVR term -- I found it several times used in textual descriptions however.

On 2/3/2014 8:32 AM, Barkmeyer, Edward J wrote:

John,

 

The fact that is-part-of is ill-defined is not a consequence of its failing to appear in a dictionary.  The inverse relationship may be called ‘contains’ or ‘comprises’ or ‘includes’ or (!@#$%) ‘has’, and those are in English language dictionaries and they are not well-defined, either.  The problem there is just that speakers often fail to realize that there are many possible interpretations of these terms and the only way to be clear about what you mean is to provide the axioms you intend.  Of course, if your intention is vague, then the absence of clarity of the _expression_  matches the absence of clarity in the thinking.

 

The second problem here is about whether we are talking about linguistic structure, and that of the English (natural) language in particular, or we are talking about ‘semantic structure’.  For knowledge engineering, it is really important to get past the linguistic structure and recognize the semantic structure of utterances.  In particular, the noun ‘part’ is a role-noun.  It is not possible for a thing to be a ‘part’ (except by extension).  It is only possible for a thing to be a ‘part OF’ something in particular.  (And it is similar in other European languages, at least, that a thing ‘is-a-part’ of/at/to/in.)  But that is an enforced linguistic structure; the semantic intent is subject is-part-of object.

 

Teaching people the English language and its grammar is a trade; and all the stuff we learned about formal models of English we learned from people who practice that trade.  Now we are talking about knowledge-engineering.  It is a different trade; and it has different formal models of ‘language’.  In this trade, we use the English words to assist in conveying intent, but the “semantic grammar” is different.   

 

We will continue to talk past one another if we use similar grammar terms with importantly different meanings.  If ‘verb phrase’ can only mean what your English teacher taught you, then we will have to adopt something like the SBVR ‘verb symbol’ or ‘verb concept wording’ to make it clear that we mean something different.  (In SBVR, ‘is (a) part of’ is a “verb symbol”; and ‘subject is a part of object’ is a “verb concept wording”, where ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are somehow marked as “placeholders” for “verb concept roles”.  The idea is that these are the grammatical parts of semantic patterns for speech.  Noam Chomsky used different terms for the same concepts in describing the “deep structure” of natural language 50 years ago (and John Sowa will undoubtedly find similar passages in the work of Charles Peirce 100 years before Chomsky).

 

-Ed

 

 

From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John McClure
Sent: Monday, February 03, 2014 6:57 AM
To: ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] The tools are not the problem (yet)

 

 

On 2/2/2014 2:23 PM, doug foxvog wrote:

On Wed, January 22, 2014 02:51, John McClure wrote:
John,
Please look at the predicates referenced in slides
<From%20Textual%20Entailment%20to%20Knowledgeable%20Machines,Invited%20presentation%20at%20the%20Joint%20Symposium%20on%20Semantic%20Processing%20%28JSSP%2713%29,%202013,Download%20PowerPoint%20Slides>
in several of the presentations you cited. You will see that they all
use a verb and often a preposition, with one exception (part of, which
can equally be expressed as is-within).
 
It's a phrase that has a different range of meanings.   The name
"isPartOf" would be a verb phrase.

[JMc] No, a 'verb phrase' by common definition includes direct and indirect objects, so "isPartOf" is not a verb phrase under that definition. There is a narrower definition (see footnote 4) but "isPartOf" fails to qualify there as well. You see "isPartOf" is a concept that cannot be found in any dictionary. It becomes anything you want it to be, depending on the day and weather. Thus freed of any anchor to an OED-based reality, you sanction artificial constructs which imo leads to modelling and interchange issues.


It can be useful within a single system to have a naming standard.

[JMc] It is more useful to have the same design approach within both FOL/non-FOL worlds, with the latter conforming to the former since data scientists' worktops & toolsets are -- from your view at least -- the ultimate destination for this information.





All RDF properties that I've seen
-- okay, there's the exception is-a in a few ontologies -- use nouns.
This system is often for predicates that mean "has <Noun>" (with
different meanings of "have" in different cases) but with the name
also indicating the intended range of the predicate.

[JMc] Sure that intention of the property's author is clear - but the 'name' ends up being a non-word, something not in a dictionary, a concept whose meaning is merely mechanical, a programmer's concept. I say this is why ontologies are unnecessarily large, having a set of properties ill-designed because they are ill-defined.


The naming system has no bearing on the semantics -- although
maybe with the ease of a human reader to come to some level
of understanding of what was intended.
 
As long as the system of nomenclature is consistent for a given
ontology, that's fine.
It's no wonder that FOL'ers need to transform these models into
something more in accordance with what I cited originally in this thread
One may choose to change names from an adopted system to fit the
local nomenclature.  Or are you referring to transformations that
add semantics?

[JMc] I am referring to translations of noun-oriented properties crafted in an RDF world to verb-oriented properties crafted in the FOL world. To the extent the FOL world adopts RDF properties (principally to avoid the work of said translation) is the extent to which the FOL world is not following its own rule that predicates are verb-oriented. This is "impedance mismatch" in action (definition: a measure of the opposition caused by differences between two paradigms, especially between object-orien ted development and relational databases ....

  • 1997, Bhavani M. Thuraisingham, Data Management Systems: Evolution and Interoperation (ISBN 0849394937), CRC Press, page 33:

Some argue that having impedance mismatch is difficult for programming intensive applications.




-- which you deleted in your original response (the guts of the original
note) to my irritation:
 
    There are two competing notions of the predicate in theories of
    grammar <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar>.^[1]
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_%28grammar%29#cite_note-1>
    ...
    The second derives from work in predicate calculus (predicate logic
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_logic>, first order logic)
    and is prominent in modern theories of syntax and grammar. _/*In
    this approach, the predicate of a sentence corresponds mainly to the
    main verb and any auxiliaries*/_ that accompany the main verb...
 
Note that the predicate *corresponds* to a verb.  That does not mean
that it *is* a verb or *must be labelled with* a verb.

[JMc] Thank you for responding to a central part of my critique. Unfortunately you're using a manufactured definition for "correspond" ... The usual definition for "correspond"  is to *have a close similarity; match or agree almost exactly* -- yours is closer to "may/might correspond", that is, you're seeing words there that don't exist.


The matter of negation is a different, side issue in my mind. Please
comment on the fundamental criticism I am making here about the design
pattern for RDF properties: FOL's verbs vs RDF's nouns.
 
My comment here is "to each her own".  It is good to have a consistent
system of naming.  
However, that does not mean that one's own fantastic
system of nomenclature given by the deities and any other system is
blasphemy.

[JMc] It is NOT "MY" system of naming -- it is "YOURS". This prevailing definition of a predicate, specifically in the context of FOL and predicate calculus -- THAT IS "YOURS" my friend.  Predicate calculus and FOL are the "deities" here not me that is for sure.

Blasphemy? Ok here's an analogy. Predicate calculus is built upon the Triple Model; undoubtedly you'd cry blasphemy when presented data that accords to some weird non-conforming Unary Model. In the same way, predicate calculus is (said) built upon predicators, as I've demonstrated by reference to published definitions. I'm saying it's the predicate calculus community that should be crying "blasphemy" at the non-conforming predicates developed within the RDF community. Yet you're not, and consequently we end up with massive ontologies that SMEs (and others) find mystifying.



regards/jmc
 
On 1/21/2014 1:04 PM, John F Sowa wrote:
   1. See the slides and publications by the Aristo Project at AI2:
      http://www.allenai.org/TemplateGeneric.aspx?contentId=12
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 1/21/2014 11:16 PM, John F Sowa wrote:
On 1/22/2014 12:01 AM, John McClure wrote:
How can FOL'ers not be implicitly derisive of the work RDF'ers are
diligently about, when the first reaction is to THROW IT AWAY?
That's not the point I was trying to make.  I'm sorry that I used
the phrase 'throw it away' because it was not clear what I was
rejecting.
 
First point:  FOL is a small subset of English and other NLs.
Any language that has the words 'and', 'or', 'not', 'some',
and 'every' can express full FOL.  We all speak FOL every day.
 
Second point:  I wasn't rejecting what can be expressed in RDF.
You can use RDF to describe anything that you see, hear, or feel.
Every observation in science can be described in RDF.
 
But RDF can't express negation.  You can't say 'not'.  And if you
take RDF and add negation, you get -- guess what -- full FOL.
 
Some things you can't say in RDF:
 
   1. Options:  you can't say 'or' in RDF, because (p or q) is
      defined as not(not p and not q) -- and RDF can't say 'not'.
 
   2. Rules:  you can't express an if-then rule in RDF, because
      (if p then q) is defined as not(p and not q).
 
   3. Generalizations:  you can express 'all' or 'every' in RDF
      because 'every cat is an animal' is defined as
      'it's false that some cat is not an animal'.
 
My major complaint about RDF is that it makes simple things difficult.
 
John
 
 
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