John,
As one of the smart people I am hopping has or will figure out the unified
logics, I am not surprised you consider it viable. My concern - one I would
be most happy to be proved wrong about, is that we have a need to define
concepts that are "hard" in FOL and that we may get tied up trying to invent
a new logic or logic of logics. While on the other hand we could get a
great deal of mileage out of upper ontologies that have the concepts we
need, but perhaps we can't reason over them with the same completeness. (01)
Is there sufficient foundation that we could start building a lattice of
upper theories? (02)
-Cory (03)
-----Original Message-----
From: John F. Sowa [mailto:sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2006 1:08 PM
To: Cory Casanave
Cc: ontac-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Before we start... (04)
Cory, (05)
I'm sending this reply to the new list. (06)
> What is a "system"?
>
> We should be careful in using such words as "system", in
> our enterprise architecture work we are very explicit that
> "system" is not limited to technology. An enterprise is
> a system, as is a business process, as are the computer
> programs that are a part of these larger systems. People,
> computers and things are all part of these systems. (07)
I certainly agree. That is the first assumption of General
Systems Theory: systems are combined to form other systems.
In fact, it's hard to find anything that is *not* a system,
since even atoms and their nuclei are systems. (08)
> Systems are structures with unifying behavior. (09)
That's a good definition, which raises another question about
what unifies the behavior. And one possible approach is to
focus on the tasks performed by the system and the messages
it sends and receives from other systems. That leads to my
earlier suggestion to address the more specific notions of
task-level and message-level interoperability. (010)
> As brain-dead as OWL+SWRL may be, you can write rules in SWRL
> that go beyond FOL. I don't know that CL can do everything
> OWL+SWRL can do either. (011)
The formal semantics of CL *includes* the semantics of RDF(S),
OWL, and SWRL as proper subsets. In fact, Pat Hayes, who was
a coauthor of the LBase document that defined the semantics of
RDF and OWL, is also one of the coauthors of the CL document. (012)
Although OWL and SWRL allow quantification over relations, they
do so in the same way as CL -- i.e., they allow quantifiers to
range over relations, but only over those relations that belong
to a specified domain, such as those things that have URIs. (013)
That's the condition for an FOL style of semantics: don't allow
the quantifiers to range over the uncountable "set of all possible
relations", but only over those that are in a specified domain. (014)
John (015)
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