RE: Learning from other disciplines?

> From: Alan Ruttenberg [mailto:alanruttenberg@gmail.com] 
> [ . . . ]
> This AKT example has been mentioned too many times
> and it is clear that independent of any 'introduced' ambiguity, the
> modeling choice is unexplained

Of *course* the modeling choice is unexplained.  I already made it clear that the point of the example is not to debate modeling choices.  The point is to address the question: *given* that something was modeled as an individual, and its interpretation turns out to be ambiguous (to some applications), how can the relationship between that term and more specific terms be indicated in a general way?

>  and incoherent from the getgo. No
> amount of patching will fix it.

Wrong.  The whole point of the "splitting" paper is to point out that all is *not* lost when this kind of problem inevitably occurs.  An ambiguous term can be related to more specific terms without breaking applications that may still be using the ambiguous term.

> 
> I note that David given *no* definitions for any of the terms he uses.
> Shall we at least agree that minimal documentation of the terms one
> uses, in natural language, is a universally applicable good modeling
> practice? At least when attempting to write in a scholarly way about
> modeling?

Since I already pointed you specifically to the descriptions of s:isBroaderThan and s:isNarrowerThan, I assume you are now referring to the terms http://jann.example#akt http://luke.example#akt1, http://luke.example#akt2 and http://luke.example#akt3, 
It should have been evident that, beyond knowing that they are being modeled as *individuals* (which is clearly stated), the precise descriptions of those terms are completely irrelevant to this problem and thus were omitted.  

> 
> > If you believe that ambiguity can be entirely eliminated by 
> > "good practice",
> > then I venture to suggest that your advice will be one of 
> > the enduring
> > problems for future knowledge workers.
> 
> I don't believe I said that. I said that in this case one needs not
> bring in any new terminology to see what's gone wrong - that applying
> basic knowledge of how to model (starting with saying what your
> instances mean) leads to a situation in which one needs not introduce
> Dave's hacky solution.

Hacky?  Perhaps.  But I haven't yet found a more elegant solution.  If you have suggestions -- for *this* problem -- I'd be interested.  Here is a restatement of the problem, using BLU instead of AKT, since you seem to dislike the AKT example:

Suppose a term http://example#BLU is defined and modeled as an *individual* -- not a class -- and it later turns out that for some applications it is ambiguous: there are three plausible interpretations of the term.  New terms http://example#BLU1, http://example#BLU2 and http://example#BLU3 are later defined corresponding to these three interpretations, i.e., more axioms are added.  Thus, the set of plausible interpretations for http://example#BLU1, http://example#BLU2 and http://example#BLU3 are subsets of the set of plausible interpretations for http://example#BLU.

The question: How would you describe, in RDF, the relationship between http://example#BLU and the new terms?



David Booth, Ph.D.
HP Software
+1 617 629 8881 office  |  dbooth@hp.com
http://www.hp.com/go/software

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Received on Friday, 27 February 2009 05:43:35 UTC