Re: [EXT] Re: Upper ontologies

Wouldn’t the granularity be controlled by the user choosing the right level
of subclass or subrelation for their needs though?

Anthony

On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 4:08 AM Marcel Fröhlich <marcel.frohlich@gmail.com>
wrote:

> "Works" is a continuum between "works well" and "works only in principle".
> Ideally you want the complexity of your conceptualization be in line with
> the data you got.
> It must be fine-grained enough to capture all distinctions important for
> your perspective.
> But if it is more detailed it quickly becomes painful, because it just
> adds a lot of clutter in the description,
> the rules and the queries. It may even require some information details
> that you cannot provide.
>
> The good thing about the RDF ecosystem is, that multiple perspectives can
> share IDs of resources,
> where appropriate. So there is actually not even an urgent need for the
> all encompassing super model.
> Btw. I do use upper ontologies (e.g. gist) sometimes, too. Having reusable
> frameworks is still a good idea.
>
> What is often forgotten is that all those disparate conceptualizations are
> out there in organizations in the heads of people.
> And all those different perspectives are likely a good adaption to their
> function and not a mistake.
> It is a key task for modelers to provide mutual understanding, which is
> foremost an organizational challenge and
> not a question of the best upper ontology. Mapping and linking challenges
> between different perspectives
> are just as important as the models themselves.
>
> Marcel
>
>
> Am Mi., 20. Jan. 2021 um 10:49 Uhr schrieb Anthony Moretti <
> anthony.moretti@gmail.com>:
>
>> If each of the 3-D and 4-D perspectives “works” and the aim was
>> standardization would it not then be a matter of just choosing one? For
>> example, we could use binary in our daily lives but we choose to use
>> decimal, and we could speak French on this list but we choose to use
>> English. Just playing devil’s advocate, I don’t have a fixed view on the
>> matter.
>>
>> Anthony
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 2:50 AM Cox, Simon (L&W, Clayton)
>> <Simon.Cox@csiro.au> wrote:
>>
>>> Ontology recapitulates philosophy.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *From:* Marcel Fröhlich <marcel.frohlich@gmail.com>
>>> *Sent:* Wednesday, 20 January, 2021 19:07
>>> *To:* phayes@ihmc.us
>>> *Cc:* Mikael Pesonen <mikael.pesonen@lingsoft.fi>; jflynn12@verizon.net;
>>> Gabriel Lopes <gabriellopes9102@gmail.com>; semantic-web <
>>> semantic-web@w3.org>
>>> *Subject:* 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>