Re: [EXT] Re: Upper ontologies

Disclosure: I read Pat's email and only skimmed over a few of the others.
Here is my take on upper ontologies.

   1. Upper ontologies offer benefits. It is more important to use AN upper
   ontology than WHICH one you use. This is consistent with points made by
   Pat.
   2. Which upper ontology you use depends on your needs. Below are some
   criteria you might consider, in a business context. The upper ontology I
   have been using for the past 10 years (gist) scores reasonably well on all
   of these. Your mileage may vary.
   1. Been around for a while
      2. Has an active user community
      3. Is designed by business people for use in business
      4. Is open source
      5. Is actively evolving
      6. There is a rich axiomatization - i.e. not just a hierarchy of
      classes and property names.
      7. Is easily adapted to a wide variety of purposes.
      8. Easy to learn and understand,
      1. small (significantly less than 1000 classes and properties)
         2. uses business-speak rather than philosopher-speak
         3. In a business context, the role of an application/domain
   ontology is typically to add structure and meaning to application data.
   This can facilitate interoperability among *similar* applications &
   databases. By contrast, the role of an upper ontology (again, in a business
   context) is to add structure and meaning and support interoperability among
   application/domain ontologies that are *not* all that similar. The
   dissimilar applications and databases DO have a number of things in common,
   such as person, building, agreement, place, employment, units of measure.
   The upper ontology captures all that.  If different ontologies are
   independently developed for applications & databases all based on the same
   upper ontology, then a lot of integration happens more or less for free.

Michael

On Tue, Jan 19, 2021 at 10:24 PM <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>

-- 

Michael Uschold
   Senior Ontology Consultant, Semantic Arts
   http://www.semanticarts.com
   LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/michaeluschold
   Skype, Twitter: UscholdM