Re: [EXT] Re: Upper ontologies

Exactly this. Thank you!

Describing the world necessarily means choosing a perspective and there is
no reason to believe that an all encompassing "fundamental" perspective
exists.

Marcel


Am Mi., 20. Jan. 2021 um 07:24 Uhr schrieb <phayes@ihmc.us>:

> OK, I had promised myself to stay out of these discussions, but …
>
> No, this will not work. It has been tried, many times. Every existing
> upper ontology was built by people who honestly believed that they would do
> this, and were willing in some cases to sacrifice years of their
> professional lives to achieve this. I was part of several of these
> initiatives, some of them financed by agencies like the US Army and DARPA.
> But still we have a host of upper ontologies.
>
> And there is a good reason why this happens. Yes, we are all talking about
> the same one world. And let us assume, for the purposes of argument, that
> we are all using the same formalism. (Of course not true, but translating
> between formalisms is relatively straighforward.) Still, we will not all
> create the same ontology, or even compatible ontologies. (I called this the
> "diamond of confusion" in a talk about 20 years ago.) And this is because
> an ontology is, in Tom Gruber's phrase, a formalization of a
> /conceptualization/, not a formalization of /reality/. And while there is
> widespread agreement on the nature of the actual world, there is most
> emphatically not universal agreement on conceptualizations of it. People
> are still arguing about ontological conceptualizations that were discussed
> by the Greek philosphers 2000 years ago.
>
> I can illustrate this with a very old, /very/ thoroughly discussed
> example, which is how to describe things that are extended in time. That
> is, things in the physical world, not abstract things like numbers or
> ideas. There are two main ways to think about this.
>
> In one, often called the 4d perspective, all things in time and space
> occupy some chunk of time and of space, and we describe them by talking
> about their parts, including their temporal 'slices'. So I – PatHayes4 – am
> a four-dimensional entity, and we can say things like [**]
> Weight(PatHayes4@2020) > Weight(PatHayes4@1966)
> to express the regrettable fact that I am getting heavier. The @ symbol
> here is a function that takes a time-extended thing (me, in this case) and
> a time, and returns a time-slice of that temporally exended thing. So
> PatHayes4@1966 is a thing that I might call 'Me in 1966', and PatHayes4
> is me throughout my lifetime. The me who is present at any particular time,
> such as now, is only one momentary timeslice of the entire PatHayes4.
>
> In another way of thinking, there is a fundamental distinction between
> 'things' (like you and me) and 'events' which happen. (Other terminologies
> are often used: continuants vs occurrents or perdurant vs endurant. I will
> stick to things and events.) Things are 3-d, dont have temporal 'parts',
> and are identically the same thing as time passes. (They continue as time
> passes; they endure.) Events happen, are temporally extended and have
> temporal parts. In a nutshell, things are 3-d, events are 4-d. So a
> football match, a wedding ceremony, a theatre performance are all events,
> but the players, guests and actors (and many other things) are things. And
> a guest at the wedding just as he arrives is identically the very same
> thing as when he is going home after the wedding, though his properties may
> have changed. Time parameters are typically arguments of properties rather
> than attached to names, so that my getting fatter might be written
> Weight(PatHayes3, 2020) > Weight(PatHayes3, 1966).  Note that the first
> arguments of these two are identical.
>
> I will not go into the pros and cons of these perspectives. Each of them
> has been a foundational perspective for an upper ontology in widespread
> use, and each has been successful. Users and proponents of each have
> published detailed philosophical defenses of them and critiques, sometimes
> bordering on slander, of the other. Each of them "works". But they are
> profoundly incompatible.
>
> The problem is that the 'things' of the second perspective are /logically
> impossible/ in the first perspective, since they have no temporal parts or
> extents – they are purely 3-d. So the thing PatHayes3 cannot be identified
> with PatHayes4. But it also cannot be identified with any particular
> 'slice' of PatHayes4, since these have different properties, but PatHayes3
> is identically the same thing at different times. There simply isn't room
> in the 4d ontology for things like PatHayes3 which have no temporal extent
> yet exist at different times. So, one might respond, the worse for 3-d
> things: but in the second perspective, those 3-d things are the basic
> fabric of reality, so wthout them there cannot be any events to happen to
> them.
>
> This incompatibility is not just a philosophical issue: it has
> ramifications all through the ontologies, affecting how entities must be
> classified, the syntactic form of the sentences that describe them, even
> how many of them there are. People learning how to use these ontological
> frameworks have to learn to /think/ in distinctly different ways.
>
> As my friends know, I could expand on this topic at much greater length,
> but maybe this will serve to give an idea why the naive idea of just
> 'choosing the best pieces' of a variety of upper (or lower, for that
> matter) ontologies is not going to work, any more than trying to make a
> hybrid car by just taking the best parts of Ford Tbird and an electric golf
> cart.
>
> There is a reason this field is called 'ontological engineering'.
>
> Pat Hayes
>
> [**] This fragment of formalization is absurdly simplified, but it
> captures the heart of the matter.
>
> On Jan 18, 2021, at 8:49 AM, Mikael Pesonen <mikael.pesonen@lingsoft.fi>
> wrote:
>
>
> This is the way I see it too, if there would be effort for the common UO.
> Take the best parts of the existing UOs and harmonize them.
>
> One would think it would also save some work in future for anyone making
> domain ontologies. Just choose the best point of view from “Standard Upper
> Ontology” and start building on it (if there were more than one point of
> view available in "SUO").
>
> On 17/01/2021 3.46, John wrote:
>
> I think the issue of upper ontologies could be relatively straightforward.
> Some esteemed organization (W3C?) should initiate an upper ontology working
> group that would become a major effort. By major effort I don’t mean going
> to the moon or Mars, but something very major indeed. It would probably
> require funding from multiple governments to reach the necessary scale of
> effort. It would select an eminent group of experts as the core working
> group members who would have the final say in defining the “standard upper
> ontology”. Inputs would be requested from a very wide source of developers
> to be considered by the working group. Th e goal of the working group would
> be to identify, as best as possible, what is true and meaningful in terms
> of relationships and what is not. A good starting point would be
> measurements and geographic classes and properties. There is a lot of good
> work already in these areas that could be leveraged. The next job would be
> to identify a constrained list of the top-level real world things that most
> domain specific ontology would need to reference. The ultimate release of
> the “Standard Upper Ontology” would serve the widest categories of ontology
> developers and they would all be strongly encouraged to use the standard in
> order to achieve the maximum interoperability. Those ontology developers
> who simply cannot live with the standard could go there own way, but
> realizing they have given up the opportunity to seamlessly interoperate
> with the majority of the Semantic Web community.
>
> John Flynn
> Semanticsimulations.com
>
>
>