Re: Ontologies with standard behavior of an information domain

Dick & All:

I hope you don't mind me poking my nose in here.

I'm familiar the Beyond Concepts paper. Following the approach Barry 
Smith prescribes in the paper will hold back progress on establishing 
meaning on the semantic web.

Simply put, without concepts there is no interpretation and without 
interpretation, there is no meaning. Meaning requires object, 
representation and interpretation.

To illustrate the significance of this trichotomy, I make an ontology 
available under a creative commons attribution license here ...

http://www.rickmurphy.org/categories.owl

based on Peirce's "On a new List of Categories." Swoop is the reference 
implementation, make sure you turn on Pellet and the list will classify 
as categories.

Lemme' know what you think.

-- 
Thanks Rick,
blog http://phaneron.rickmurphy.org
web  http://www.rickmurphy.org
cell 703-201-9129

Richard H. McCullough wrote:
> 
> Hi Alan & Zille
> 
> I'm back from jury duty, and
> I read Smith's "Beyond Concepts" paper, and
> I skimmed through the basic ontology.
> 
> As I understand "Realism", I agree with the philosophy.
> I was introduced to this philosophy by
> Ayn Rand's "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology".
> I consider her discussion of concepts to be outstanding.
> However, she barely touches on the subject of "actions".
> 
> In my terminology, "processes" are either
> "actions" -- single entity, or
> "interactions" -- multiple entities.
> I barely touch on the subject of "interactions".
> 
> If you want to get a feel for my ontologies,
> I suggest that you look at
>    http://mKRmKE.org/kb/spo.mkr.html
>    http://mKRmKE.org/kb/tabrasa.html
>    http://mKRmKE.org/kb/tabrasa.def
> 
> You will need some understanding of
> my Knowledge Representation language, mKR,
> to read these ontologies.  I suggest looking at
>    http://mKRmKE.org/doc/MKRintro.html
> Note that mKR has extensive features for describing
> context, definitions, actions, methods, n-ary relations.
> 
> My Knowledge Explorer, mKE, has built-in features
> for interfacing with OpenCyc, OWL, RDF.
> 
> Dick
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard H. McCullough" 
> <rhm@pioneerca.com>
> To: "Alan Ruttenberg" <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>; "Zille Huma" 
> <zille.huma@upb.de>
> Cc: <semantic-web@w3.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 7:26 AM
> Subject: Re: Ontologies with standard behavior of an information domain
> 
> 
>>
>> Hi Alan & Zille
>>
>> I suspect my ontologies are very similar to Alan's,
>> but I use terminology that is a little more like ordinary English.
>> (see http://mKRmKE.org)
>>
>> compare
>>    process has_participant continuant
>> to
>>    entity do action done;
>>
>> process <=> action
>> continuant <=> entity
>>
>> actions can have modifying phrases which specify time, object, etc.
>>
>> I plan to read your references carefully,
>> but first I have to finish my jury duty.
>> I'll get back to you soon.
>>
>> Dick
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alan Ruttenberg" 
>> <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
>> To: "Zille Huma" <zille.huma@upb.de>
>> Cc: <semantic-web@w3.org>
>> Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 6:06 AM
>> Subject: Re: Ontologies with standard behavior of an information domain
>>
>>
>>>
>>> On May 28, 2008, at 8:36 AM, Zille Huma wrote:
>>>
>>>> Actually, My interest is to use ontologies in business domain and  
>>>> then define the semantics of web services on the basis of these  
>>>> business ontologies. For example, in the given example, the  
>>>> semantics of a HotelBooking web service can be defined more  
>>>> precisely with an underlying tourism ontology. Thanks for  
>>>> mentioning the ontologies that also contain standard behavior  
>>>> information. I am more curious about how the behavior can be  
>>>> captured in ontology, i.e., what is the structure of any behavioral  
>>>> node in an ontology.  What in your opinion is a better way to  
>>>> capture behavioral information in an ontology, e.g., behavior may  
>>>> be captured in the form of business process or stand alone 
>>>> activities, etc.
>>>
>>> Hi Zille,
>>>
>>> In my own work, I've been using the Basic Formal Ontology (http:// 
>>> ifomis.org/bfo) as the upper level ontology, which defines processes  
>>> as distinct from things that are not processes (continuants). 
>>> Processes(occurents) are dependent, via the has_participant 
>>> relation,  on continants. They have parts, which are other processes 
>>> that occupy  a piece of the space time of the whole process.
>>>
>>> The underlying philosophy of representation is called "Realism",  
>>> which I can best describe as an attempt, when defining terms, to 
>>> make  clear an "audit trail", if you will, to entities in the real 
>>> world,  i.e. an understandable correspondence between what is being 
>>> defined  in the ontology to things that exist or happen actually. If 
>>> you are  interested in reading more, check out 
>>> http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/
>>>
>>> In some ways this avoids the question of what is better, since the 
>>> comparison is of what is represented to what is out in the world. 
>>> But  of course this doesn't answer the full question in practice. In  
>>> practice you would first want to make clear what you want to be able  
>>> to say, and then determine what you will need to be able to ask and  
>>> have answered using your ontology.  Answers to such questions might  
>>> determine the formalism, or level of detail at which you represent  
>>> your processes.
>>>
>>> As an example, if all you want to do is record something in an  
>>> Ontology and then read it out, then there is little constraint. If  
>>> you want it to be able to be merged with other people's work, then  
>>> there are some. If you want to be able to state general temporal  
>>> relations between activities and have consistency of your ontology  
>>> checked, then you can't even do this within the framework of the  
>>> current  web ontology languages.
>>>
>>> Experience in the OBI project suggests that you work early on  
>>> outlining such "competency questions" for your ontology.
>>>
>>> If you give some such competency questions, I could see if I have any 
>>> experience that might be relevant to your representation issues, or 
>>> perhaps point you at people that do.
>>>
>>> -Alan
>>>
>> Dick McCullough
>> mKE do enhance od "Real Intelligence" done;
>> knowledge := man do identify od existent done;
>> knowledge haspart proposition list;
>> http://mKRmKE.org/
>>
>>
>>
>>
> Dick McCullough
> http://mKRmKE.org/
> knowledge := man do identify od existent done;
> knowledge haspart proposition list;
> mKE do enhance od "Real Intelligence" done;
> 
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 3 June 2008 15:31:16 UTC