RE: Upper ontologies

Krzysztof Janowicz wrote:
>  meaning is in our heads, not in the world.

This in itself is a debated philosophical position. :D

-----Original Message-----
From: Krzysztof Janowicz <janowicz@ucsb.edu> 
Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2021 11:52 AM
To: Neil McNaughton <neilmcn@oilit.com>; Martin Thomas Horsch <horsch@inprodat.de>; semantic-web@w3.org
Subject: Re: Upper ontologies


On 1/12/21 2:22 AM, Neil McNaughton wrote:
> Does this not imply that every time you move up a level in an ontology there are "different points of view have advantages and disadvantages". If an upper level ontology is impossible, why are levels top-1, top-2 etc. doable?


Science and society are in constant flux. Meaning is an emerging and evolving property of (human) cognition both on the individual and societal level. Put differently, meaning is in our heads, not in the world. Meaning cannot be fixed in ontologies. Instead, ontologies aim at restricting the interpretation of domain terminology towards their intended meaning. Such restriction aims to maximize semantic interoperability, i.e., to minimize cases where parties exchange information that seems valid on a syntactic level but where the expected semantics of the target does not match the semantics of the source.

Once we leave the ground of concrete domains and their tasks, we lose the context that helps restrict a domain's terminology and a sense for the required quality of this restriction, e.g., the choice of axioms. As a result, top-level ontology becomes metaphysics - useful, but not easily ground-able. One top-level ontology may declare that there are two disjoint kinds: objects and events. A second such ontology may declare that 'objects are just very slowly evolving events'. You can select the one you prefer, but none of them is wrong. It is also often unclear when and why one would have to restrict the interpretation of terminology for a certain, concrete task, e.g., data retrieval, by going all the way up the abstraction hierarchy.

Personally, I often search for measurement types and face the semantic interoperability challenge that two different measurement procedures go by the same name. I rarely search for things that are 'substances', 'occurrences', or 'forms'. All that said, I fully understand the intellectual joy of designing and studying these top-level ontologies, but I see their use in providing us with answers to the big questions of what can be said and which distinctions make sense and less on the level of actionable theories.

Jano


>
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martin Thomas Horsch <horsch@inprodat.de>
> Sent: Monday, 11 January 2021 17:04
> To: semantic-web@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Upper ontologies
>
> Dear Mikael,
>
> four reasons. The first one applies to all standardization, and to all metadata standards, not only top-level ontologies, and it is simply that multiple concurrent development efforts exist. Here, as in many cases, there is no authority that can enforce the uptake of a single standard.
>
> Second: By selecting a top-level ontology, you commit yourself to a philosophical position on what sort of things can exist in the world.
> Unsurprisingly, it is impossible - and undesirable - to make everybody accept the same point of view. Also, different points of view have advantages and disadvantages depending on what exactly you want to do.
>
> Third: It is also not a major problem. At the level of domains of knowledge, there will always be semantic heterogeneity, or in other words, multiple domain ontologies will be in use at least in some domains. Therefore, solutions addressing this heterogeneity need to be co-developed with any major innovation in data management anyway.
>
> Fourth: Once a top-level ontology has been developed, it can never disappear. Even if most of the community recommended one of them, the others would still be around, and people would be able to use them.
>
> Best wishes,
> Martin
>
> On 11/01/2021 16:40, Mikael Pesonen wrote:
>> Maybe this is a stupid question but why is there (at the moment) 17 
>> different upper ontologies:
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_ontology

>>
>> Isn't the idea to make just one that everyone can use?
>>
>>
>>
>

--
Krzysztof Janowicz

Geography Department, University of California, Santa Barbara
4830 Ellison Hall, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4060

Email: jano@geog.ucsb.edu
Webpage: http://geog.ucsb.edu/~jano/

Semantic Web Journal: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net

Received on Tuesday, 12 January 2021 17:50:36 UTC