|
Aldo,
I'd be interested in the paper too.
Thanks,
Leo
_____________________________________________
Dr. Leo
Obrst The MITRE Corporation, Information
Semantics
lobrst@xxxxxxxxx Center for Innovative
Computing & Informatics
Voice: 703-983-6770 7515 Colshire
Drive, M/S H305
Fax: 703-983-1379 McLean, VA
22102-7508, USA
Dear Pat, in 1997-1999 the current Rome group of LOA (Ontology and
Conceptual Modelling Group of ITBM-CNR at that time) had made a UMLS-SN
alignment (actually not only an alignment, because several strategies have
been applied to import "types", "relationships", informal "templates", and to
axiomatize the glosses) to an ontology (ON9) partly similar to DOLCE.
The original Ontolingua code including ON9 and the medical plugin based
on the UMLS-SN alignment are at this URL:
http://www.loa-cnr.it/medicine/.
Some publications about that work as well as the re-engineering of the
Metathesaurus can be downloaded from the LOA site.
Consider that a previous version of ON9 had been used by Teknowledge in
the development of SUMO.
I've considered porting ON9 medical section under DOLCE, so if someone is
doing the work, that can be highly facilitated by looking at what we have
done. We could also provide some assistance.
Cheers
Aldo
PS a copy of the paper separately to you
At 19:09 -0500 22-11-2005, Cassidy, Patrick J. wrote:
Aldo,
I would also like to get a copy of your
paper.
The ONTACWG I mentioned previously (http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologyTaxonomyCoordinatingWG)
is discussing a group
effort to compare upper ontologies by doing a formalization of the UMLS
Semantic Network with respect to each of the upper ontologies of
interest to members -- OpenCyc, DOLCE, SUMO, BFO, ISO 15926. The
suggestion is that by trying this kind of formalization on a restricted size
ontology (The UMLS-SN had 1230 classes and 54 semantic relations), a
volunteer group like the ONTACWG might be able to collect useful information
on just how different these upper ontologies are and whether a merger is
feasible. We still have no funding. I do hope that if we can
make some meaningful progress on this limited effort, we may be able to
attract funding from some source.
If anyone on the DOLCE list knows of similar efforts, I would
appreciate being kept aware so as to avoid duplicative effort. Our
effort is, as I mentioned, is fully open to participation from any source,
and the results will be public domain or freely usable with attributions of
sources (e.g. Cyc or SUMO or DOLCE).
Pat
Patrick Cassidy
MITRE
Corporation
260 Industrial Way
Eatontown, NJ 07724
Mail Stop:
MNJE
Phone: 732-578-6340
Cell: 908-565-4053
Fax:
732-578-6012
Email: pcassidy@xxxxxxxxx
From: dolce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:dolce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Aldo
Gangemi
Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2005 6:46 PM
To:
dolce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; Gilles Kassel
Cc: oltramari@xxxxxxxxxx;
ferrario@xxxxxxxxxx; catenacci@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [dolce] A
question about collections
Hi Gilles,
thanks a lot for your remarks. We were aware of the problem,
because we had assumed constitution in a different, larger meaning at the
time of the report you are referring to.
We have now a different solution, implemented in a new
article, which does not use either dependency or constitution from DOLCE.
Instead, it uses cognitive schemas as an intuitive basis for introducing
membership.
I'm sending you the article separately. For those in the DOLCE
list that are interested too, please contact me.
Some more comments inside.
At 9:23 +0100 21-11-2005, Gilles Kassel wrote:
Dear all,
I read with great
interest the paper entitled "From Collective Intentionnality to
Intentional Collectives: an Ontological Perspective" (a submitted paper
available on DOLCE's publications page). Actually I would like to reuse
this conceptualization to reconstruct an ontology of organizations that
we recently proposed at LaRIA (Amiens, France) with a PhD student. My
objective is also to integrate this conceptualization in the ontological
resources of the OntoSpec methodology (see the technical report about
OntoSpec on DOLCE's site). However, the way the first layer of the
proposal is defined, that is the notion of collection, seems to
me raising a problem, notably in its articulation with DOLCE.
On one hand, it is recalled that in DOLCE « relations
between instances of the same category are admitted, such as
part, constitution, connectedness, etc." And, indeed,
the axioms Ad21 and Ad22 published in (Masolo et al., 2003) say that
"physical (respectively non-physical) endurants constitute, and have for
constituents, only physical (respectively non-physical)
endurants".
Correct
In this paper, on another hand,
collections are defined as social objects, therefore as non-physical
endurants, and the membership relation as a constitution
relation. And, in the same time, it is claimed that physical endurants
can constitute a collection: "Endurants constituting a collection are
either mereotopologiccaly unconnected (e.g., statues in a statuary) or
weakly connected (e.g., a pile of plates)".
Therefore, if
the constitution relation is the same as DOLCE's one, and I guess
it is the case, there is clearly a contradiction.
Correct, as I was saying, we had assumed constitution in a
more tolerant sense, dealing with so-called "stratification", so that
social entities can "emerge" out of physical ones. The current restriction
for "generic constitution" in the OWL version of DOLCE-Lite-Plus is indeed
different from the S5 version of full DOLCE.
In an attempt to fully axiomatized the tolerant notion of
constitution, we have encountered some interesting properties of
emergence: for example, it seems that constitution can be kept compliant
with DOLCE axioms if we assume that the emergent collection is constituted
by the *information content* of the members, and not directly by the
members. An appropriate chain of relations allows to refer to members
anyway.
Anyway, such notion of constitution needs more work, and after
all, does not make justice to the "basic" intuition of a collection, one
the most important patterns acquired during cognitive development. For the
time being we then decided to adopt a cognitive schema, formalized in an
appropriate way (see article).
In a first attempt to extend DOLCE to
build an ontology of organizations, we tried to reuse the notions of
agentive-group and unitary-collection of (Masolo et al.,
2003) defined as physical objects. However, we met some problems: i)
firstly, the lack of a generic notion of collection and the difficulty
to propose one ; ii) secondly, the fact that when members of a group (or
a collection) are geographically dispersed, considering the whole as a
physical object seems not tenable ; iii) lastly, the axiom Ad29,
relating the part and constitution relations, seems too strong if we
interpret a sub-group (or a sub-collection) as being a part of a group
(or a collection): indeed, if x is a member of a group (or a collection)
y and y' is a sub-group (or sub-collection) of y not containing x then
no x' being part of x and constituting y' will
existŠ
The proposition made in this paper has (from my opinion)
some advantages, in particular concerning the points i) and ii) above.
However, I guess that it contradicts the axiom Ad22. Moreover, I still
have problems concerning the axiom Ad29. If, for instance, the technical
staff and the commercial staff of a society are considered as parts of
the staff, then, for the reasons mentioned above, it is easy to find
counter-models for Ad29.
Ad29 is also at odds with the tolerant notion of constitution
(not exactly for the reason you indicate btw), in fact, it would imply
that, if Gilles is a member of a staff, its leg should be a constituent of
a part of that staff. And this makes no sense. As I said, we were thinking
about a Hartmann-like notion of emergence, not about DOLCE's one, but this
fact is wrongly described in the old report. In the new one, consitution
is no more used.
I take advantage of this mail to raise a
last a last question. The fact of defining collections as social
objects, and not as non-physical endurants in general, excludes private
collections that would be embodied in physical agentives as mental
objects. Is there a particular reason for this
exclusion?
Mental objects are underdeveloped even in the DOLCE-Lite-Plus
version. We are actively working on integrating social and mental objects.
BTW, I don't see any problem in having collections of mental objects,
despite the fact that collections are social objects.
By "social" we mean something that can be communicated (in
principle), and relies on some encoding. By "mental" we try to catch
something that is not necessarily communicable. But a collection is by
definition communicable, because it is a reification of an (extensional)
class, which is an abstract entity, then it stands on an encoding
system.
One could wonder if there exists something which is collective
but exclusively mental, i.e. non-communicable. We haven't gone so far yet.
We are still investigating on the possibility that there are mental
objects as a disjoint class from social ones. If one decides not, your
problem disappears.
Notice that we are not trying to be prescriptive on what is
mental or not, but we need to understand on which grounds something can be
claimed to be mental without being social (and of course without being a
physical neurobiological process or object). Philosophy of mind has spent
substantial resources in the attempt to solve the problem ...
I suppose Alessandro Oltramari, Roberta Ferrario, and Carola
Catenacci have probably more beef about these issues.
Still thanks for the great questions.
Cheers
Aldo
--
Aldo Gangemi
Research Scientist
Laboratory
for Applied Ontology
Institute for Cognitive Sciences and
Technology
National Research Council (ISTC-CNR)
Via Nomentana 56,
00161, Roma, Italy
Tel: +390644161535
Fax:
+390644161513
aldo.gangemi@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.istc.cnr.it/createhtml.php?nbr=71
SPONSORED LINKS
Science
fair projects Science
projects Computer
science Dolce
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
--
Aldo Gangemi
Research Scientist
Laboratory for Applied
Ontology
Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technology
National
Research Council (ISTC-CNR)
Via Nomentana 56, 00161, Roma, Italy
Tel:
+390644161535
Fax:
+390644161513
aldo.gangemi@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.istc.cnr.it/createhtml.php?nbr=71
SPONSORED
LINKS
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
_________________________________________________________________
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 (01)
|