John, (01)
That is exactly how I see thing as well. Under Thing there are physical
and abstract things, there are independent things (like a bank) and
relative things (like a loan provider), there are occurrent things and
there are things which, well, I already trod on the land mine called
"Continuant" without realising that it was put there by Polish
existentialists or something, but there are things which can be measured
in terms of width, breadth, duration of existence and so on, and there
are even things which continue to exist over time but are relative, such
as an account provider or a loan servicer. (02)
These are all real things. Real things aren't just concrete, continuant
(oops!), independent things. The point is that all those other kinds of
things are still real - they are not a design construct. The fact that a
loan has a loan servicer is not a design construct, it's a fact about
the real world and any business person can validate it, understand what
it means and provide a meaningful business definition against that term.
A business goal or an investment objective is an abstract thing but it's
a still a Thing. (03)
I realise that it's sometimes hard to maintain the boundary between what
is real and what is a design construct. I struggle with it all the time.
It's part of what I call the art of not designing something. But it is
important, I feel. The way I approach all this, is that an ontology is
something equivalent to a business requirements specification: just as a
requirements specification (or requirements catalog) provides a business
conceptual view of the required behavior of some program, so the
semantic model provides the business conceptual view of what some
logical data model design will implement. This is all as per Zachman
terminology as you know, but it's worth setting this out I think,
because there are certain formal rules that always apply to business
requirements specifications, and I believe they should apply just as
much to an ontology. For example, a requirement must be independent of
how it is implemented, it must be understandable to business, it must be
implementable and so on. Rule one, if applied to ontology, indicates
that it should model what is and not what is a good way of representing
this in some design. That way there is a clear language boundary between
the business conceptual view and the design and implementation, and
there are no limiting design assumptions imposed on the design before a
competent designer gets hold of it. (04)
Incidentally the "common sense" business approach I take is based almost
entirely on your book, so I don't feel I'm saying anything new here, but
I hope it addresses your point. (05)
Mike (06)
John F. Sowa wrote:
> Mike,
>
> That is rather vague, especially since many ontologies use the
> type Thing as the top category that includes physical objects,
> abstract entities, relations, properties, events, situations,
> propositions, etc:
>
> MB> As I see it, ontology is about defining things and facts about
> > those things. By a process of elimination, anything that is not
> > a thing or a fact is a matter of design and has no place in an
> > ontology.
>
> If you consider Thing in the sense it is used in Cyc and many other
> ontologies, it does very little to limit the scope.
>
> John
>
>
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>
> (07)
--
Mike Bennett
Director
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