On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 09:09:36AM -0000, West, Matthew R SIPC-DFD/321
wrote:
> > Conclusion of the Upper Ontology Summit
> >
> > The theory and technology of knowledge representation have advanced
> > to a stage where the concepts that are the meanings of terms can be
> > formally
>
> MW: Ontology is supposed to be about what exists, not the meaning of
> terms. (01)
I think you're equivocating on both "ontology" and "about" here,
Matthew. True enough, a *given* ontology purports to be about some
chunk of the world. But we talk about the world by using language, and
surely it is a primary function of an ontology to fix the meanings of
its component terms with sufficient rigor to faciliate the accurate
exchange of information. In that sense big-O Ontology -- the nascent
science of constructing and using little-O ontologies -- is very much
about meaning. In fact, I would argue that Ontology is much more about
meaning than "what exists". There are perhaps good philosophical
reasons to think that an ontology is effective in virtue of accurately
describing what exists -- I believe this myself -- but that is just a
philosophical stake in the ground that, ultimately, doesn't much matter;
it's more religion than science. Your 4Dism, for example, postulates
that things that are temporally located in the future relative to us
nonetheless exist as robustly as we do. Philosophically, I find that
position repugnant. But, as I've acknowledged before, it might be a
useful assumption to make for certain knowledge engineering purposes
like planning, in which case so much the worse for my delicate
philosophical senstivities. Ultimately, whether or not we are
describing what there is -- REALLY -- is neither here nor there. The
question is whether our ontologies *work*, whether the axioms and
definitions we provide for the terms they contain provide effective,
well-defined, systematic characterizations of the phenomena we have
found it important for our purposes to represent. (02)
Chris Menzel (03)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/uos-convene/
To Post: mailto:uos-convene@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Community Portal: http://ontolog.cim3.net/
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/UpperOntologySummit/uos-convene/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UpperOntologySummit (04)
|