Ontolog invited Speaker Presentation - Dr. Pat Hayes - Thu 2006-10-26    (QXG)

Conference Call Details    (QXH)

Attendees    (QXZ)

Agenda & Proceedings    (QY8)

[picture of Dr. Pat Hayes] http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/presentation/PatHayes_20061026/PatHayes_2006.png    (QYA)

Abstract: (by PatHayes)    (QYB)

Over the past few years a series of initiatives have converged on the design of a 'common logic' into which a large variety of alternative logical notations and formalisms can be projected, and so can act as an expressive foundation for ontology interchange and standardization. This talk will briefly survey the design principles that have emerged from these discussions and the outline of the resulting framework, which is currently going through ISO approval as ISO Common Logic, and a more recent extension called IKL, designed explicitly for ontology interoperation, which provides a variety of powerful naming conventions which enable it to explicitly describe relationships between ontological frameworks. We will illustrate the talk with examples showing how description logics such as OWL, modal and temporal logics, hybrid logics and context logics can be mapped into CL and IKL.    (QYC)

I hold a meaningless job title at the Florida IHMC, a smallish interdisciplinary research center located on the Gulf Coast, where the superb seafood more than makes up for an occasional hurricane. I am currently a member of the W3C Data Access Working Group tasked with the design of an RDF/OWL query language. I have been at various times an AI researcher, a Luce Professor of cognitive science, a Professor of philosophy, a notational engineer and a Semantic Web researcher. The common thread running through all this is an enduring interest in how informal knowledge can be formalized, and in the actual semantic machinery of formalization itself. My work that is of most interest to ontologists is probably, in order: one of the first attempts to use formal logic to describe everyday physical knowledge, in a series of papers on "Naive Physics" published in the 1980s; a series of papers on temporal ontologies, culminating in one of the first thorough comparative surveys; and more recently, contributions to the writing of new 'standard' logics, including the W3C semantic web ontology standard sequence RDF/RDFS/OWL and the ISO Common Logic draft standard; and most recently, the IKL logic developed with ChrisMenzel and others. This recent work has strengthened my long-standing belief that formal logic (and philosophy more generally) should be the servant of a pragmatic approach to writing ontologies: a valuable servant, but not the master. For example, the pragmatic requirements of publishing formal content on an 'open' Web seem to require us to re-examine several unspoken assumptions in the foundations of logic which have become widely accepted without being subjected to critical examination. Rather than trying to force the world to use textbook logic, we have chosen to rebuild the foundations.    (QYK)

Other interests include what is often called "logical AI", which is of course closely related to ontology design, the philosophical foundations of cognitive science, and the analysis of consciousness (which itself, I believe, is closely related to how we perceive the "passage of time" - a phrase which is physically meaningless yet intuitively compelling.)    (QYL)

Session Recording of the PatHayes Talk    (QYV)

 (Thanks to BobSmith and PeterYim for their help with getting the session recorded.  =ppy)    (QYW)