Re: [EXT] Upper ontologies

If it were in a wiki somewhere it could approximate a book...

On Wed, 20 Jan 2021 at 13:45, Jos De Roo <josderoo@gmail.com> wrote:

> Did exactly the same, appended Pat's posting to local file pat.txt
> Thanks Pat !!!
>
> Jos
>
> -- https://josd.github.io/ <http://josd.github.io/>
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 1:34 PM Hugh Glaser <hugh@glasers.org> wrote:
>
>> Thanks Pat - an excellent and well-timed posting.
>> I will save it for future use and savouring.
>>
>> I think that the discussion illustrates the problem.
>> Upper Ontology is a concept.
>> Some people conceive of it as singular.
>> Others as plurality.
>>
>> > On 20 Jan 2021, at 06:17, phayes@ihmc.us wrote:
>> >
>> > 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> 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
>> >
>>
>> --
>> Hugh
>> 023 8061 5652
>>
>>
>>