John,
Yes! The paper you reference below seems very much to the point and most of
the nested graph models approaches outlined would be more than sufficient to
represent the kind of "family of Ontologies" that we are suggesting is
needed for COSMO. I can see the approach being useful both "within" a model
and to manage the set of related models. While I don't pretend to
comprehend all of the math, it seems more approachable than category theory. (01)
While the full extent of context may be difficult, it is my belief that that
being able to assign multiple dimensions of context and select the
appropriate statements for that context is tractable since it is reasonably
easy to see how a program or set of rules could be written to do so. The
behavior of these rules that I have in mind follows closely to the
meta-levels approach in the paper. Since I don't have the formal logic
background you or many of the people on the list do, perhaps we can
collaborate to isolate the requirements and see how this could be formalized
without introducing hard problems. (02)
Here is one test case; Lets assume that NIST has published a set of
Ontologies, one of them being for "Units". So there is a context of
subject; Units and there is a context of Provenance - NIST (Provenance being
derived from the speech act of publication). I could assert in a
manufacturing ontology that I want to trust [include the context of]
published statements of Nist with regards to Units. Some of these units may
be in the location context of earth, so I may have a space flight ontology
that trusts the trust published statements of Nist with regards to [in the
context of] Units that are not in the context of earth. (03)
The above cross-section of context demonstrates why equating groups of
statements to a "file" is insufficient for a broad based family of
Ontologies. The semantics of "An ontology" is not well defined (as far as I
know) other than to say it is a bunch of statements (Sorry for the lack of
Greek). In addition, the way terms are directly tied to concepts in many
formalisms combined with global or primitive namespace mechanisms makes
management of a large, potentially conflicting and open set of terms and
concepts difficult. Files, Global name spaces and concepts not separated
from terms would not seem to scale well for the purposes of this group as I
understand it. Perhaps context is a better organizational principle than
files or web URLS for sets of ontological statements? (04)
The same set of problems we have run into with modeling in the large seem to
apply to Ontologies in the large. If we were successful in applying context
we would not have to impoverish COSMO due to conflicting domains but would
separate these concepts into the appropriate context. In addition we would
have a better way to handle the multiple terms assigned to concepts and
reduce the number of statements that would need be applied to any one
computation. Does this make sense? (05)
I suspect much of this is worked out in CL, is that a candidate language?
Another interesting source that I mentioned before, but as we explore this I
am thinking may be very relevant; "Semantics of business vocabulary and
business rules" (http://www.omg.org/docs/bei/05-08-01.pdf). In particular
the vocabulary part introduces a modal and non-monotonic formalism based on
but extending FOL, specifically designed to capture shared vocabularies. (06)
-Cory (07)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontac-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontac-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 1:53 AM
To: ONTAC-WG General Discussion
Subject: Re: [ontac-forum] Neutrality Principle (08)
Folks, (09)
I've been tied up with several things today, but I'd
like to make some comments about contexts. (010)
First, I agree with Barry that the issues involving
contexts are complex: (011)
BS> ... in addition to building the ontology (or ontologies),
> which is hard, we would need to build also a theory (or
> theories) of contexts on a level on top of that, which is
> even harder... (012)
In an earlier reply to Cory, I briefly mentioned a couple
of different informal notions of context, but rather than
continue to use the overworked term "context", it would be
better to avoid that word altogether unless we reach a
consensus about what we mean by the word "context". (013)
In my KR book and in a later article, I developed a theory
of context, which builds on some writings by the logicians
C. S. Peirce, Michael Dunn, and John McCarthy: (014)
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/laws.htm
Laws, Facts, and Contexts (015)
In a different forum, I participated in some discussions about
this use of the word "context", and McCarthy emphasized the
point that the whole field is an important research area, but
one that is still too much in flux to be standardized. I very
much agree with him. (016)
On the other hand, I disagree with the second half of the
following point that Barry made in the same note: (017)
BS> Certainly, the ontology of ordinary speech acts is itself
> a good candidate (low-hanging fruit) for what might be included
> in a ground-level ontology; but not, please, an ontology of
> those speech acts which are used by a certain very small and
> very specialized community when it talks about ontologies. (018)
I doubt that a detailed specification of all the kinds of speech
acts is really low-hanging fruit, but what I disagree with is the
claim that there's a "very small and very specialized community"
that "talks about ontologies." Whether they use the word or not,
the database administrators who choose labels for the tables and
columns of a relational database are making "ontological commitments"
(as Quine used to say). In fact, anybody who chooses labels for
the columns of a spreadsheet is making an ontological commitment. (019)
A major task for this group is to establish guidelines for making
those commitments in a principled way and to propose methods for
relating the commitments by one group to those by another. (020)
But that's a topic for another day. (021)
John Sowa (022)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://colab.cim3.net/forum/ontac-forum/
To Post: mailto:ontac-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subscribe/Unsubscribe/Config:
http://colab.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontac-forum/
Shared Files: http://colab.cim3.net/file/work/SICoP/ontac/
Community Wiki:
http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SICoP/OntologyTaxonomyCoordinatingWG (023)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://colab.cim3.net/forum/ontac-forum/
To Post: mailto:ontac-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subscribe/Unsubscribe/Config:
http://colab.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontac-forum/
Shared Files: http://colab.cim3.net/file/work/SICoP/ontac/
Community Wiki:
http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SICoP/OntologyTaxonomyCoordinatingWG (024)
|