RE: [ontac-forum] Problems of ontology

["Obrst, Leo J." <lobrst@xxxxxxxxx>]

John,

 

I'm sorry, but you want to have your cake and eat it too: deny the possibility of an upper ontology but accept that a logically ordered collection (lattice? poset?) of upper, middle, and domain ontologies is perfectly fine.  We ALL believe in a lattice of theories these days. That includes upper theories, middle theories, domain theories. So what's your beef? An uber ontology of everything is very bad because we foist decisions on the middle and domain folks? Not going to happen. If we arrive at at a coherent uber ontology, a theory of everything, that is actually a very good thing if you believe in the scientific method. If we arrive at a "collection" of theories that address upper, middle, domain levels, that is a very good thing. If they are all related via logical relations, that is a very good thing. If we can design a systematic way of establishing those logical relations among theories, that is a very good thing.

 

We agree on a lot of very good things, I think.

 

Leo

 

_____________________________________________ 
Dr. Leo 
Obrst       The MITRE Corporation, Information 
Semantics 
lobrst@xxxxxxxxx    Center for Innovative 
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From: ontac-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontac-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Peterson, Eric
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 4:08 PM
To: ONTAC-WG General Discussion
Subject: RE: [ontac-forum] Problems of ontology

Thanks for your reply John.

 

Perhaps the moral of the story is that both Upper Ontology pessimists and optimists both have or can have a similar interest in mapping or merging upper ontologies together.  Perhaps the two camps might be persuaded to map/merge in the same way.

 

To that end, in my previous message I tried to make the point that we need to fix things before we try to map or merge them. I also advocate that if we are mapping rather than merging, that we map with real ontological relations rather than relations designed for mapping.

 

So the act of mapping becomes loading the two ontologies into a common enviroment and linking the two artifacts with sameAs, subClassOf, partOf, and other relations.

 

All my thoughts and effort toward mapping and merging upper ontologies have been centered on the creation of a merged lattice of types and and a merged lattice of relations.  For my purposes, this is where I seem to be getting value.  Theory boundaries seem to me to be more arbitrary and less useful stuff with which to integrate databases.  I'm still not sure if we actually differ on this point.  I'm suspecting that we agree.

 

Best,

 

-Eric Peterson

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From: ontac-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of John F. Sowa
Sent: Tue 5/16/2006 12:12 PM
To: ONTAC-WG General Discussion
Subject: Re: [ontac-forum] Problems of ontology

Eric,

That is essentially what I am recommending:

 > I simply need many more definitions than I presently have and
 > I find it very cost effective to grab definitions from Cyc.

What I am proposing is a collection of theories organized by
generalization and specialization.

Whenever you grab definitions from Cyc, you create a new theory
that is a subset of the theory from which you grabbed them.
As a subset, that theory is a *contraction* of the original.
Then by *expansion*, you add more axioms to specialize the
theory to the one that is appropriate for your task.  Those
are the basic operators of theory revision.

Bundy et al. were also suggesting some operators that were
different from the usual AGM operators of adding and deleting
axioms.  They also modified the representation by changing
the signature of various predicates (i.e., changing the
number and types of the arguments they expect).  Those
are important, and they can also be interpreted as moving
from one theory to another in the lattice of theories.

John


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