Re: updated uncertainty ontology

Just a small comment, I have found useful Wikipedia articles (- I have 
added links to our wiki) about ambiguity and vagueness, especially they 
claim, that "Ambiguity is distinct from vagueness, which arises when the 
boundaries of meaning are indistinct" e.g. ambiguous is the expression 
"JugWine" and vague is "sweet wine", see http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-guide/ 
discussion on owl:DeprecatedClass
Peter

Mitch Kokar wrote:
> 
> Kathy,
> 
> Here are my replies to your changes.
> 
> On Jan 7, 2008, at 11:44 PM, Kathryn B Laskey wrote:
> 
>> 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 like your descriptions of Empirical. This is definitely a better 
> description than what we had before for "Randomness". However, the name 
> "empirical" seems to be strange here, but if you think this is the name 
> to use, then I have no problem. The other opposite of "empirical" is 
> "theoretical". So would you say that the other types (ambiguity, 
> vagueness and inconsistency) are theoretical and not empirical? This 
> might be the case, but it's just that I am not sure.
> 
> I would prefer a different description of Randomness. You say "sentence 
> is an instance of a class" - do we need the notion of class here? Could 
> we just say that "there is a statistical law governing whether the 
> possible worlds satisfy a sentence"? Or something of this sort?
> 
>>
>>
>> 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.
> 
> Agreed (see above).
>>
>> 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 like this. In my first attempt I wanted to capture exactly what you 
> mentioned above - open to multiple interpretations. Your description 
> captures this much better.
>>
>> 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."
>>
> The example of tall is very good. This is exactly what I had mind, too. 
> My intuition here points to fuzzy logic. The only problem with the 
> description now is that vagueness looks very much like ambiguity. 
> Perhaps we should make a reference to multi-valued logic here?
> 
>> 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 Wednesday, 9 January 2008 10:54:00 UTC