Re: No universal things Re: comparing XML and RDF data models

On Thursday, July 03, 2008 4:45 PM, Bijan wrote:
My official position, scarily enough, is that you don't need a  definite 
metaphysical view in order to build good ontologies ;)
> I do think that the family of views in computational ontologies generally 
> called "realist" is indeed naive and fundamentally wrong  headed. Whether 
> it's a "useful fiction" that helps people write  better or more compatible 
> ontologies is an open empirical question.

On Thursday, July 03, 2008 12:52 PM, Bernard wrote:
> If you think my statement is senseless, feel free to explain why, as Alan 
> took the time to do.

Bernard and Bijan,

Your ''official'' position, hope hardly prescribed by the W3 Consortium 
office, falls into a category of bad intellectual fashion: to see the world 
as ontologically unreal. There is a bunch of people who dreams that reality, 
nature, truth, experience, all key ontological, physical and biological 
entities as well as mathematical objects, together with evidence, document, 
proof, etc. are socially constructed. They also claim that nature itself as 
all its scientific constructs, natural laws and properties as energy and 
mass, all are culturally contingent, or home-made. For their unofficial 
position, these folks got a funny name, ''strong social constructionists''. 
They go so far as to make such declarations as ''everything is constructed, 
from the universe to quarks'', ''nothing is given'', ''nothing comes from 
itself'', ''no natural facts, only social facts'', ''the truth is 
convertible with the made'', ''no questions, no knowledge'', ''no 
explanations, only representations''; or as your claims, ''no descriptions, 
no things'' , ''realism is naive''. As a bad consequence, both knowledge and 
meaning are viewed as an invention, artefact, interpretation, or rather a 
fiction of human minds. And information is defined as processed data that 
have meanings created by its users.
There was a IFIP task force, dedicated to socialy create ''the ontological 
framework of information systems concepts'', assuming that ''things are 
conceptions'' (see the FRISCO report to grok what you get with an inadequate 
ontological mentality, 
http://cs-exhibitions.uni-klu.ac.at/index.php?id=445).  Browsing the report, 
one may see the consequences of such an epistemic malady for information 
sciences and computing systems.
Although now fashionable, this mindset brings more harm than good for your 
intelligent minds and hence would-be intelligent applications. The right 
answer to the question, if meaning (as quarks) is socially constructed, i.e. 
unreal, or it is determined by the nature of things, i.e. a real phenomenon, 
will make all the difference for the whole cause of semantic machines.
Sum-up: The simple truth is the semantic web is ultimately about effective 
machine representation of the categorical (mathematical) structure of 
reality (world ontology) by computing tools and semiotic means, as 
mechanical meaning making and meaning signifying. But in no way, this 
ontological artifact is just a pure construction of some visionary or a mere 
result of social interactions of individual minds.

regards,
Azamat Abdoullaev
http://www.eis.com.cy

PS: A systematic account about reality, its ontological structure, 
representation, meaning, encyclopedic knowledge systems, and real semantic 
web one can find in the Universal Ontology book, 
http://www.igi-global.com/books/details.asp?id=7641;
http://www.amazon.com/Reality-Universal-Ontology-Knowledge-Systems/dp/159904966X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215177153&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-uk&field-author=Azamat%20Abdoullaev&page=1

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bijan Parsia" <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
To: "Bernard Vatant" <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>
Cc: "Peter Ansell" <ansell.peter@gmail.com>; "Semantic Web" 
<semantic-web@w3.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 4:45 PM
Subject: Re: No universal things Re: comparing XML and RDF data models


>
> On 3 Jul 2008, at 10:52, Bernard Vatant wrote:
>
>>>> [Bijan] I don't know what a universal thing (is).
>>>>
>>>
>>> [Peter] Sorry, I thought that would be obvious. In my realist view 
>>> there are
>>> things that people are trying to describe using RDF and those things
>>> have identities, which we are labelling with names, or describing
>>> through identifying properties. These are universal things. If you
>>> want to establish equality you are likely to be doing it at this
>>> level, unless you assume that markup is everything and a thing is  only
>>> in existence because there is a description of it, and the  description
>>> of the thing causes the thing to exist.
>>>
>> Peter, sorry to be as harsh on that as Bijan has been, but I  consider 
>> this viewpoint as not sustainable, and dangerously naive.
>>
>> I for one assume very strongly indeed that 'the description of the  thing 
>> causes the thing to exist', and my hunch is that Bijan will  follow me on 
>> this (at least I hope so).
> [snip]
>
> My official position, scarily enough, is that you don't need a  definite 
> metaphysical view in order to build good ontologies ;)
>
> I do think that the family of views in computational ontologies  generally 
> called "realist" is indeed naive and fundamentally wrong  headed. Whether 
> it's a "useful fiction" that helps people write  better or more compatible 
> ontologies is an open empirical question.
>
> But I, for one, wouldn't bet on it.
>
> (I kinda wish it were...then we'd have realism justified as a useful 
> fiction and it doesn't get better than that :))
>
> Interestingly, we've had three sorts of claim about RDF that tries to 
> support the "xpath is too structure sensitive"):
>
> 1) RDF just has the kind of structure for which this doesn't happen  (that 
> seems to be the original claim, plus some "it's easier to  explore")
> 2) RDF is Python to XML's Perl. The strong version is that RDF really 
> only has One Way to Say It. The weaker claims is that RDF encourages 
> standard ways to say it or has fewer ways to say it.
> 3) RDF aligns with reality (or better with reality) thus ends up with 
> reasonably similar models.
>
> (Argh. These are more than a bit facile. I'm trying to sloganize to  get 
> the feel for different positions. Please don't take these as my  full 
> account of the various perspectives.)
>
> What's strange about all of them is that they are conceptual  arguments, 
> almost purely and simply. I remember a class I co-taught  at UMD. CS 
> graduate students interested in AI. They had an assignment  to write 20 
> things about themselves (in English) and then translate  them into OWL.
>
> I would bet that there was more convergence on *content* than on how  to 
> represent that content!
>
> I remember also a project where we were trying to get people to write 
> simple triples. They got that they needed triples. But what they  ended up 
> putting into the tool was things like
>
> S       P      O
> "The cat is" "on the" "mat".
> "Mary eats" "pudding" "on toast"
>
> They just split up the sentences into somewhat equal parts!
>
> None of this is to say that there aren't differences and benefits  worth 
> exploring. But representation is *hard*. Using representations  is *hard*. 
> Evolving systems with representations and queries is  *hard*. We hope to 
> make all this easier, but there really is no  semantic bullet.
>
> Cheers,
> Bijan.
>
>

Received on Friday, 4 July 2008 13:38:01 UTC