Re: [EXT] Re: Upper ontologies

I was wondering the same. Is there some things first option can express 
and second can't and vice versa? Or are they just "different languages" 
with same expressivity?

On 20/01/2021 11.49, Anthony Moretti wrote:
> If each of the 3-D and 4-D perspectives “works” and the aim was 
> standardization would it not then be a matter of just choosing one? 
> For example, we could use binary in our daily lives but we choose to 
> use decimal, and we could speak French on this list but we choose to 
> use English. Just playing devil’s advocate, I don’t have a fixed view 
> on the matter.
>
> Anthony
>
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 2:50 AM Cox, Simon (L&W, Clayton) 
> <Simon.Cox@csiro.au> wrote:
>
>     Ontology recapitulates philosophy.
>
>     *From:*Marcel Fröhlich <marcel.frohlich@gmail.com
>     <mailto:marcel.frohlich@gmail.com>>
>     *Sent:* Wednesday, 20 January, 2021 19:07
>     *To:* phayes@ihmc.us <mailto:phayes@ihmc.us>
>     *Cc:* Mikael Pesonen <mikael.pesonen@lingsoft.fi
>     <mailto:mikael.pesonen@lingsoft.fi>>; jflynn12@verizon.net
>     <mailto:jflynn12@verizon.net>; Gabriel Lopes
>     <gabriellopes9102@gmail.com <mailto:gabriellopes9102@gmail.com>>;
>     semantic-web <semantic-web@w3.org <mailto:semantic-web@w3.org>>
>     *Subject:* Re: [EXT] Re: Upper ontologies
>
>     Exactly this. Thank you!
>
>     Describing the world necessarily means choosing a perspective and
>     there is no reason to believe that an all encompassing
>     "fundamental" perspective exists.
>
>     Marcel
>
>     Am Mi., 20. Jan. 2021 um 07:24 Uhr schrieb <phayes@ihmc.us
>     <mailto:phayes@ihmc.us>>:
>
>         OK, I had promised myself to stay out of these discussions, but …
>
>         No, this will not work. It has been tried, many times. Every
>         existing upper ontology was built by people who honestly
>         believed that they would do this, and were willing in some
>         cases to sacrifice years of their professional lives to
>         achieve this. I was part of several of these initiatives, some
>         of them financed by agencies like the US Army and DARPA. But
>         still we have a host of upper ontologies.
>
>         And there is a good reason why this happens. Yes, we are all
>         talking about the same one world. And let us assume, for the
>         purposes of argument, that we are all using the same
>         formalism. (Of course not true, but translating between
>         formalisms is relatively straighforward.) Still, we will not
>         all create the same ontology, or even compatible ontologies.
>         (I called this the "diamond of confusion" in a talk about 20
>         years ago.) And this is because an ontology is, in Tom
>         Gruber's phrase, a formalization of a /conceptualization/, not
>         a formalization of /reality/. And while there is widespread
>         agreement on the nature of the actual world, there is most
>         emphatically not universal agreement on conceptualizations of
>         it. People are still arguing about ontological
>         conceptualizations that were discussed by the Greek
>         philosphers 2000 years ago.
>
>         I can illustrate this with a very old, /very/ thoroughly
>         discussed example, which is how to describe things that are
>         extended in time. That is, things in the physical world, not
>         abstract things like numbers or ideas. There are two main ways
>         to think about this.
>
>         In one, often called the 4d perspective, all things in time
>         and space occupy some chunk of time and of space, and we
>         describe them by talking about their parts, including their
>         temporal 'slices'. So I – PatHayes4 – am a four-dimensional
>         entity, and we can say things like [**]
>
>         Weight(PatHayes4@2020) > Weight(PatHayes4@1966)
>
>         to express the regrettable fact that I am getting heavier. The
>         @ symbol here is a function that takes a time-extended thing
>         (me, in this case) and a time, and returns a time-slice of
>         that temporally exended thing. So PatHayes4@1966 is a thing
>         that I might call 'Me in 1966', and PatHayes4 is me throughout
>         my lifetime. The me who is present at any particular time,
>         such as now, is only one momentary timeslice of the entire
>         PatHayes4.
>
>         In another way of thinking, there is a fundamental distinction
>         between 'things' (like you and me) and 'events' which happen.
>         (Other terminologies are often used: continuants vs occurrents
>         or perdurant vs endurant. I will stick to things and events.)
>         Things are 3-d, dont have temporal 'parts', and are
>         identically the same thing as time passes. (They continue as
>         time passes; they endure.) Events happen, are temporally
>         extended and have temporal parts. In a nutshell, things are
>         3-d, events are 4-d. So a football match, a wedding ceremony,
>         a theatre performance are all events, but the players, guests
>         and actors (and many other things) are things. And a guest at
>         the wedding just as he arrives is identically the very same
>         thing as when he is going home after the wedding, though his
>         properties may have changed. Time parameters are typically
>         arguments of properties rather than attached to names, so that
>         my getting fatter might be written
>
>         Weight(PatHayes3, 2020) > Weight(PatHayes3, 1966).  Note that
>         the first arguments of these two are identical.
>
>         I will not go into the pros and cons of these perspectives.
>         Each of them has been a foundational perspective for an upper
>         ontology in widespread use, and each has been successful.
>         Users and proponents of each have published detailed
>         philosophical defenses of them and critiques, sometimes
>         bordering on slander, of the other. Each of them "works". But
>         they are profoundly incompatible.
>
>         The problem is that the 'things' of the second perspective are
>         /logically impossible/ in the first perspective, since they
>         have no temporal parts or extents – they are purely 3-d. So
>         the thing PatHayes3 cannot be identified with PatHayes4. But
>         it also cannot be identified with any particular 'slice' of
>         PatHayes4, since these have different properties, but
>         PatHayes3 is identically the same thing at different times.
>         There simply isn't room in the 4d ontology for things like
>         PatHayes3 which have no temporal extent yet exist at different
>         times. So, one might respond, the worse for 3-d things: but in
>         the second perspective, those 3-d things are the basic fabric
>         of reality, so wthout them there cannot be any events to
>         happen to them.
>
>         This incompatibility is not just a philosophical issue: it has
>         ramifications all through the ontologies, affecting how
>         entities must be classified, the syntactic form of the
>         sentences that describe them, even how many of them there are.
>         People learning how to use these ontological frameworks have
>         to learn to /think/ in distinctly different ways.
>
>         As my friends know, I could expand on this topic at much
>         greater length, but maybe this will serve to give an idea why
>         the naive idea of just 'choosing the best pieces' of a variety
>         of upper (or lower, for that matter) ontologies is not going
>         to work, any more than trying to make a hybrid car by just
>         taking the best parts of Ford Tbird and an electric golf cart.
>
>         There is a reason this field is called 'ontological engineering'.
>
>         Pat Hayes
>
>         [**] This fragment of formalization is absurdly simplified,
>         but it captures the heart of the matter.
>
>
>
>             On Jan 18, 2021, at 8:49 AM, Mikael Pesonen
>             <mikael.pesonen@lingsoft.fi
>             <mailto:mikael.pesonen@lingsoft.fi>> wrote:
>
>
>             This is the way I see it too, if there would be effort for
>             the common UO. Take the best parts of the existing UOs and
>             harmonize them.
>
>             One would think it would also save some work in future for
>             anyone making domain ontologies. Just choose the best
>             point of view from “Standard Upper Ontology” and start
>             building on it (if there were more than one point of view
>             available in "SUO").
>
>             On 17/01/2021 3.46, John wrote:
>
>                 I think the issue of upper ontologies could be
>                 relatively straightforward. Some esteemed organization
>                 (W3C?) should initiate an upper ontology working group
>                 that would become a major effort. By major effort I
>                 don’t mean going to the moon or Mars, but something
>                 very major indeed. It would probably require funding
>                 from multiple governments to reach the necessary scale
>                 of effort. It would select an eminent group of experts
>                 as the core working group members who would have the
>                 final say in defining the “standard upper ontology”.
>                 Inputs would be requested from a very wide source of
>                 developers to be considered by the working group. Th e
>                 goal of the working group would be to identify, as
>                 best as possible, what is true and meaningful in terms
>                 of relationships and what is not. A good starting
>                 point would be measurements and geographic classes and
>                 properties. There is a lot of good work already in
>                 these areas that could be leveraged. The next job
>                 would be to identify a constrained list of the
>                 top-level real world things that most domain specific
>                 ontology would need to reference. The ultimate release
>                 of the “Standard Upper Ontology” would serve the
>                 widest categories of ontology developers and they
>                 would all be strongly encouraged to use the standard
>                 in order to achieve the maximum interoperability.
>                 Those ontology developers who simply cannot live with
>                 the standard could go there own way, but realizing
>                 they have given up the opportunity to seamlessly
>                 interoperate with the majority of the Semantic Web
>                 community.
>
>                 John Flynn
>
>                 Semanticsimulations.com <http://Semanticsimulations.com>
>

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