Re: updated uncertainty ontology

Mitch,

I made a couple of changes to the uncertainty ontology. Please look  
them over and let me know what you think.

I was uncomfortable with the word "random" being used as broadly as  
you use it.   The standard usage of the term random connotes a  
phenomenon that follows a statistical law. There is much ontological  
debate over whether randomness in this sense really exists.  Most  
people would not use the label random for sentences that have a  
definite but unknown truth-value -- such as whether Sacco and Vanzetti  
were guilty. Nevertheless, we can apply probability to such sentences  
(see the book on the Sacco and Vanzetti case by Jay Kadane and Dave  
Schum).  I took the liberty of changing the term to empirical on the  
ontology page.  I haven't changed any of the diagrams, and if I'm  
overruled we can go back -- but I really think this terminology is  
more appropriate. Then I made randomness a subclass of empirical  
uncertainty.  I chose this terminology because that is the term used  
by Morgan and Henrion (1990), which I have added to the reference  
list.  It is an excellent reference on uncertainty.

I also don't think it's right to say for the case of randomness that a  
sentence is satisfied in one of the worlds.  An event in probability  
theory is a sentence that has a definite truth-value in each world  
(satisfies the clarity test) and is satisfied in a subset of worlds.   
I changed the definition to correspond to this.

I have issues with your definition of vagueness and ambiguity also.   
For ambiguity, you say a sentence can be satisfied in many worlds.   
Consider a sequence of 50 coin tosses, and consider the sentence that  
the first toss is heads.  This sentence is not ambiguous.  Its meaning  
is perfectly clear.  It is satisfied in 2^49 of the 2^50 possible  
worlds.  I looked at many definitions of ambiguity. It means open to  
multiple interpretations; not clearly defined. I changed the  
definition of ambiguity to "the referents of terms in a sentence to  
the world are not clearly specified and therefore it cannot be  
determined whether the sentence is satisfied".

I also changed vagueness to "there is not a precise correspondence  
between terms in the sentence and referents in the world".  The  
prototypical example of vagueness is the concept of "tall" -- each of  
the possible worlds specifies a definite height, but there is no  
referent in the world for the term "tall."

I am not thrilled with these definitions, but they are the best I  
could do.  I don't think the original definitions were tenable for the  
reasons I've given.  Does anyone care to comment or make additional  
changes?

  I also added anchors to the wiki page, so that links can be included  
to the WikiWords in the uncertainty ontology.  For example, go to the  
Discovery or Appointment Making use cases, which have both now been  
annotated.  If you click on, for example, UncertaintyNature, it will  
take you to the place in the uncertainty ontology where  
UncertaintyNature is defined.

Kathy

On Dec 19, 2007, at 9:19 AM, Mitch Kokar wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> In order to annotate the "buying speakers" scenario I had to extend
> the Uncertainty Ontology a bit. Attached is a new version. Also
> attached is a graphical representation of the annotation of the
> scenario. I will explain the details in the telecon.
>
> ==Mitch
>
> Content-Disposition: attachment;
> 	filename=Uncertainty-v2.owl
> <Uncertainty-v2 1.owl><Picture 1 5.png>

Received on Tuesday, 8 January 2008 04:44:53 UTC