Re: [EXT] Re: Upper ontologies

Dear Marcel,

right because this would no longer be a perspective but the world as it 
is and not as it appears to us. Kant called this the "Ding-an-sich".

Dieter

On 20.01.2021 09:07, Marcel Fröhlich wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <http://Semanticsimulations.com>
>
>
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-- 
Dieter Fensel
Chair STI Innsbruck
University of Innsbruck, Austria
www.sti-innsbruck.at/
tel +43-664 3964684