Barry, (01)
I know about your long term commitments to the great cause of ontology and
highly respect you contribution to the most challenging human enterprise.
Moreover, to my opinion, you and John Sowa are among main contributers in
the theoretical field of formal ontology since 1995. But seemingly you both
had never read ontological researchers made in the USSR Academy of Sciences.
For example, in 1989 and 1991 years, the Academy issued my two books, where
there being fornulated the principles of general formal ontology and its
applications for information technology development, one of them was named
as ''Introduction into the Information World''. The main thrust of the book
was that the information society intellectual and knowledge technologies
can't be constructed without ontological models of the world. It looks we
need to return to the same issues tried and solved many years ago. So there
is nothing personal, only the big wish to advance the Grand Ontology
business, to which we all here dedicated our best effort, most time and all
attention. (02)
Regarding your objections. They are all-well understood and have rational
grounds. The clear answer to most of them you can found in the USECS PDF
Document in four easy steps: go to the website (http://www.eis.com.cy),
download the file, open (it opens with the lattice of entities diagram), and
choose a type of entity of your interest, Substance or objects; State or
properties; Process of Change or changes and hapenings; and Relationship or
specific relations. You don't need to browse all the material, it is too
much. Just see the introductions, where you may find the explanation and
description of the nature of entities, their definitions, axioms, and basic
types, and all existing subtypes and instances. And please note, despite
like it or not, I try to read all your works and papers, considering them as
a highly professional approach to the matter. (03)
Returning to the issue. Let me emphasize some points of UFO missing because
of misunderstanding or because of not being clear). (04)
First of all, there is the world, reality, the universe, Entity, Thing,
Being, the sum and totality of things or entities or beings, aggregated as
subworlds, groups, collections, and systems of ontological kinds and
individuals. Next, there are four fundamental classes of Entity (or Thing)
in which the mind (or intelligent machine) comprehends (or represents and
reasons over) reality, its basic aspects, features and dynamic entity
relationships: Substance, State, Change, and Relationship. (05)
The notions of substance and relationship look mostly controversial
subjects. (06)
Substance taken in the most general sense is supposed to mean the whole
class of substantial thing expressed as a mass noun (please don't miss it
with the class of thing as a whole expressed by a countable class name of
concrete objects or living beings). Here are its features.
a) Substance is a mass entity. By its definition,Substance refers to the
stuff (entity) of which all the objects are composed. The substance mass
nouns include the names of all material substances: solid substances and
materials, liquids, gases, and what not. So there are Substances denominated
by mass nouns (as water, earth, air, fire, etc.), and there are kinds of
substances or portions of them denominated by count nouns (most may be found
in the USECS)
b) Examples of the class of substance are indicated by the individual parts
of a mass as a part, a piece, a portion, a bit, an article, an item, an
element, an atom, or a drop of some substance. This implies that there is
the substances and materials in general such as earth, land, wood, glass,
metal, paper, cloth, water, oil, butter, bread, and there are particular
meanings of them like as a piece of glass, a paper, a cloth, a part of land,
etc. Additionally such examples may be expressed by reference to a container
(a basket, bucket), to a piece of a certain shape of some substance ( a
stick, strip, slice, sheet, roll, lump, heap, block, blade, etc.), or to a
measure (a ton, kilo, meter). Thus, a substance (or material) taken in
general is denoted by a mass name, while one separate unit made of that
substance denoted by a count noun referring to an object, which is a
particular substance having mass and occupying space.
Crucially, the notion of concrete object combines the concept of bare
substance and form ( intrinsic substantial properties, qualities and
quantities, i.e., substantial states). As soon as you constructed the notion
of concrete objects, often misplaced with things, other specific things come
out: conditions, states, cases, qualities of State; occurences, events or
happenings of Change; and particular ties, associations, bounds,
constraints, couples, links, and bindings of Relationship (Order). Then may
follow the ontological statements like as: There are concrete objects in the
material world; Objects have intrisic properties, parts, occupy some state,
subject to changes, and stand in various relationships to other objects,
etc. (07)
Analogically, the Class of State refering to the special states and
conditions and qualities and quantities taken in the most general
ontological sense is expressed by a mass name. It includes two generic
types: Quality and Quantity. There are many types, examples, and cases of
State, as well as there is one Change in general, its few types
(substantial, qualitative, quantitative, dynamic, and relational or
causality) and many occurrences (most may be found in the USECS). (08)
Thus the same logic of things holds with the entity universals, each of
which is viewed as the whole class of Thing, State, (Process of Change), and
Relationship. This allow you formally express Reality as a whole by world
variable W (the set of all possible world states), its dynamics or change
via the transformation function F, as in a circular self-mapping equation W
= F(W). Having the world equation, move to the world's constituents:
1. Substance space (the set of all possible substances) indicated by a
substantial class variable (O);
2. State space (the set of all possible states represented by a state
variable (S);
3. Change space (the set of all possible changes) symbolized by variable
(C);
4.Relation space (R), the set of all possible contraints and laws,
constructed in the simplest binary case as the Cartesion product of the
entity spaces (O, S, C, R)x(O, S, C, R).
That's it. You thus produce the formalism for UFO capable to cover the high
level notions of theoretical sciences and upper ontologies. (09)
To check. Introduce a system as a collection of matter bounded by other
objects (note a boundary comes from outside, like in a hole, never from
inside), its state, change or dynamics in time with {many, one}-{many, one)
transformation modes, and causal relations or restraints (laws of changes).
For discrete quantities enter probabily distributions of states P(S), then a
stochastic process of change can be written by a matrix of change
probabilities. A system's state space is constructed like this: all the
values (results) of all possible measurements (or observations) of all the
system's properties (attributes or dimensions) given at a certain time make
up its state, while the collection of all possible states of the system make
up its state space. The number of distinct states constitutes the size of
the state space, which is its change (or variety in Cybernetics). The state
of the system (or the values of the properties or attributes) is (are)
subject to the process of changes spontaneously or under actions of other
systems. But in the couse of the changes of states, the values are liable to
restrictions imposed by causal, spatial, temporal relationsips (the laws,
constraints, of reality). This is the ontological basics of any science,
theoretical physics or second-order cybernetics or mathematics of dynamic
systems. (010)
About RELATIONSHIP, 'the Adhesive of the World', its definition and axioms
may be formulated as follows: (011)
Def. Relationship is a basic kind of thing relating entity classes [each
having a relationship property (as its role)].
Axioms: (012)
the existence axiom: relationship exists really by (in or of) itself, over
and above the things connected; (013)
the order axiom, relationship is the principle of order which determines the
ways all things are arranged or associated; (014)
the order reversal axiom: every relationship has its inverse counterpart
(opposite or complement); (015)
the instantiation axiom: a particular relation is a generic relationship
holding among particulars; (016)
the comparison axiom: everything is comparable as identical, like or unlike. (017)
The definition and axioms define the major species of relation as its
subordinate types, which are: (018)
1. the relationships in space and in time, (019)
2. the relationships of cause and effect; (020)
3. the relations of parts and the whole; (021)
4. the opposite relations of entities; (022)
5. the comparative relations of similarities and differences, qualitative
and quantitative, direct or rhetorical. (023)
As for the preposition to be 'in' and its various senses. (024)
To see the meaning of any prepositions, it is necessary to refer to the
relation types mentioned above. For example, the preposition to be 'in' can
be used in many various senses: 1) the part (species) 'in' the whole
(genus); 2) the whole (genus) 'in' the parts (species); 3) the form 'in' the
matter; 4) the action 'in' the agent; 5) by reason, as a result of, 'in'
fear; 6) for a purpose of, something is 'in' a thing's end; 7) a thing is
contained, included, or bounded in something else as 'in' a receptacle, 'in'
time, 'in' space; 8) by means of, 'in' a language; 9) with respect to, 'in'
skill; 10) according to, 'in' my thinking; 11) possession, to have 'in' him.
Still this is not all possible meanings, here is also the further senses: to
be occupied, 'in' search of something, to be made out of, 'in' wood, to be
wearing, 'in' red, to be surrounded by, 'in' the snow, etc. The same happens
with its synonyms into, and with a set of antonyms such as beyond, by, from,
out, past, through, with and with other English prepositions such as after,
at, before, for, of, to. (025)
Let me conclude the relational topic with respect to the grammar and
semantics of natural language. (026)
There is something essentially defective in the present linguistic verbal
typologies, like WordNet or RDF schema encoding meaning as a collection of
sentence triples of subject-verb-object (027)
They all are missing a set of relative verbs as a separate semantic
category. It involves the whole gamut of possible relationships among
different entity forms as signs, constructs, and extra-linguistic things,
including: (028)
the part-whole relation verbs ('divide', 'compose', 'categorize',
'classify'); (029)
the comparison predicates ('compare', 'identify', 'resemble', 'differ'); (030)
the verbs of opposition ('oppose', 'contrast', 'contradict'); (031)
the verbs indicating causality ('do', 'make', 'determine', 'initiate,
'effect', 'induce', 'stimulate'); (032)
the verbs of spatial relations ('displace', 'transfer', 'place', 'position',
'locate', 'site', 'direct'); (033)
the verbs of temporal relations ('time', 'endure', 'elapse', 'pass', 'expire',
'precede', 'follow'); (034)
the verbs of logical connections ('imply', 'entail', 'infer', 'deduce',
'follow', 'reason', 'prove', 'think'); (035)
the verbs of semantic relationships ('apply', 'denote', 'connote', 'refer
to', 'designate', 'signify', 'represent', 'stand by', 'symbolize', 'mean',
'express', ' communicate', indicate', 'depict', 'record'). (036)
Barry, this all and more can be found in the work, ''Standard Ontology For
Machines and People'', intended to be published as a book. Just ask for more
information. (037)
Regards, (038)
Azamat Abdoullaev (039)
http://www.eis.com.cy (040)
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Smith, Barry" <phismith@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: "ONTAC-WG General Discussion" <ontac-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2006 5:22 PM
> Subject: Re: [ontac-forum] Re: The world may fundamentally be inexplicable (041)
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