Re: Ontologies with standard behavior of an information domain

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 Saturday, 31 May 2008 18:40:11 UTC