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

["John Yanosy Jr." <jyanosyjr@xxxxxxxxx>]

John,

I understand and appreciate your response, and I acknowledge your statement that time and space are not always necessary for all concepts. As I forgot and your triggered memories of my system engineering designs, where in many cases I defined state machines that determined behavior of a system without the use of time dependencies. These were logical dependencies.

I was trying to agree with the concept that it I find it useful to keep some general concepts separate from a domain ontology and then integrate them from a standardized or reputable source ontology as necessary. Hopefully this would enable the reuse of many time-space concepts and relations, thus keeping my errors to a minimum.

I am not sure this would be classified as use of an upper ontology, as much as reuse of other ontologies that are widely understood and reputable and useful in many domains. For example I would find a state machine ontology useful in multiple domains.

Sincerely,

John Y

On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 8:33 AM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear Matthew, Cory, and John Y,

MW

> If I understand you correctly, you are using state in a different sense,
> that I would call class of state. These are of course useful in the way you
> describe, but are not particular states of affairs, which is the sense in
> which we are using the term.

Since a class consists of a type (specified by a monadic predicate) and
a set of entities of that type, then our definitions are consistent.

Fundamental principle:  The word 'state', as used in computer science
and systems, is independent of any space-time coordinate system.
The logical dependencies between states in a computation should
be distinguished from the time points of the physical processes.

A failure to distinguish those dependencies has led to many computer
bugs that appear when one component of a system is upgraded to
a faster version.

CC

> Of course 3d Ontologies are important, but I don't see how this
> is or could be a conflict.

There is no conflict.  I was just making the point that we should have
a common generalization of the word 'state' that can be applied to
mathematical systems (e.g., a Turing machine) and to physical systems.

CC
> As for " data structures, computation, and message passing are independent

> of any assumptions about space and time ", I don't see how this could be

> the case.  Those structures, messages, etc. are about something...

JY

> It does seem to me that space and time are general concepts that can
> apply to almost any other concept in an ontology.

2+2=4 is independent of space and time.  In fact, all of mathematics
is independent of space and time.  Since it's hard to find any
application that does not use math (at least at the level of 2+2=4),
ontologies must accommodate math.

This is a point that Carl Adam Petri made:  the logical connections
in a procedure are independent of the time and speed of the computer.
If you just have a single sequential process, you can define the
relationships in terms of a linear ordering (such as time).

But when you have multiple interacting processes, the logical
constraints are not linear.  If you replace one component with a
faster component, the timing may be very different, but the logical
dependencies -- and the results of the computation --don't change.

Summary:  It's important to distinguish the time constraints
from the logical dependencies.

John

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--

Peace be with you,
John A. Yanosy Jr.

Mobile: 214-336-9875

eMail: jyanosyjr@xxxxxxxxx

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jyanosyjr

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