Re: [EXT] Upper ontologies

Great explanation, it satisfies me, thank you Maria! I'll check out the
survey and the tool too, thanks a lot.

Anthony

On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 1:29 AM Maria Keet <maria.keet@uct.ac.za> wrote:

> Hi Antony,
>
> They are not equally expressive, because you have another ‘fundamental
> element’. Those roles of relations can be used to express constraints that
> are not available to assert in the standard view because it lacks that
> element to declare them on, notably subsetting and disjointness of roles.
> Of course, one can transform and approximate.
>
> If the philpapers survey is anything to go by [1], then it doesn’t look
> like that there will be one that prevails from an ontological viewpoint.
> Pragmatics and such might lead to one or the other becoming dominant, but
> even that is a far stretch to assume it will happen. To see that, you can
> play with various scenarios in the foundational Ontology Selection and
> Explanation Tool [2], where different requirements for one’s domain
> ontology can end up as a different best-fit foundational ontology (only a
> few of them were included). This would be likewise for standard view vs
> positionalist—the latter comes in handy in implementations, so it is
> unlikely to be cast aside by the conceptual data modelling community, but
> the former has less ‘clutter’ in the logical theory and so tends to be
> preferred there.
>
> [1] https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
> [2] first version, and as jar file http://www.meteck.org/files/onset/, v2
> as swf for download and an online version (also flash):
> http://www.thezfiles.co.za/ROMULUS/ontologySelection.html. The content
> that went into the tool as comparison tables:
> http://www.thezfiles.co.za/ROMULUS/ontologyComparison.html
>
> Regards,
> Maria
>
> On 20/01/2021 22:29, Anthony Moretti wrote:
>
> CAUTION: This email originated outside the UCT network. Do not click any
> links or open attachments unless you know and trust the source.
>
> Thanks Maria. Similarly to the 3D/4D distinction though, if both views of
> relations are equally expressive and the aim is standardization is it not
> just a matter of choosing one?
>
> Another point from others that I'm not sure how much weight to give is how
> long people have been arguing about these things. Mathematicians have
> argued forever about the foundations of mathematics, but as far as I know
> since the 1920s the majority have settled on ZFC, and even though it's not
> the only possible foundation it's been useful for those 100 years. So in
> the same vein isn't it possible that we might also eventually settle on a
> system even though there are many?
>
> Anthony
>
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 1:23 PM Maria Keet <maria.keet@uct.ac.za> wrote:
>
>> Hi Anthony,
>>
>> One can refine the 'fundamental' relations (though there is no agreement
>> on what they are) and add sub-relations as finer-grained ones cf all on par
>> or more/less compact as variations in encodings, but even if you were to
>> agree on that, then that still does not resolve  disagreements as to the
>> nature of what a relation is and those distinctions still would result in
>> different upper ontologies.  The two well-known ones in use are called
>> 'standard view' and 'positionalist'.
>>
>> The standard view is baked into in OWL and first order predicate logic:
>> there's a relation/relationship/objectproperty and a fixed order to its
>> participants. in shorthand notation, e.g., for loves(John, Mary) or, at the
>> type level, partOf(Heart,Human), then John has to take up the first place
>> in the relation and Mary the second, not the other way around--that John
>> loves Mary doesn't mean that it is reciprocated in that loves(Mary, John)
>> would hold as well, and likewise for partOf. When the participants are
>> swapped in their order, we seemingly have to have another relation to stay
>> true to the state of affairs, say, lovedBy(Mary,John) and
>> hasPart(Human,Heart), respectively.
>>
>> It's easy to declare loves & lovedBy and partOf & hasPart inverses of one
>> another, sure, but one can argue (among other reasons) that it's not right
>> to need two relations for the same state of affairs between John and Mary
>> or between Human and Heart. Instead, there are two ways to talk of the same
>> relation that holds between its participants. One of the ways to address it
>> is positionalism.
>> With the positionalism, there's only one relation--say, loving and
>> parthood, respectively--and it relegates loves, loved by, part of, has part
>> and so on to a language layer. That relation in positionalism consists of n
>> unordered roles in the n-ary relation, where each participant plays a
>> designated role. Indicating such roles within square brackets, then writing
>> it down as
>> loving([lover],[beloved])
>> or
>> loving([beloved],[lover])
>> is all the same, but we need a function that assigns John to [lover] and
>> Mary to [beloved]; e.g., play(John,[lover]) and play(Mary,[beloved]). One
>> can do likewise for parthood and any n-ary relation (alike
>> R([role1],[roleA],[role-i])). Alternatively, it can be seen as taking
>> projections over the participants in the relations. It's a common notion in
>> UML class diagrams with its association ends and EER with the
>> non-directional relationships and its relationship components, as well as
>> in ORM (Object-Role Modelling).
>>
>> Positionalism asserts that there are such roles that make up relations
>> and that they are essential components of relations, whereas the standard
>> view does not admit them into the universe, which is irreconcilable
>> ontologically. This is an orthogonal issue to the 3D/4D distinction that
>> Pat described, so there we go with adding more to the proliferation of
>> upper ontologies.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Maria
>>
>> ----
>> Dr. Maria Keet
>> Associate Professor
>> Department of Computer Science
>> University of Cape Town
>> Cape Town, South Africa
>> tel: +27 21 650 2667
>> fax: +27 21 650 3551
>> email: mkeet@cs.uct.ac.za
>> work: http://www.cs.uct.ac.za
>> home: http://www.meteck.org
>>
>>
>>
>> On 20/01/2021 17:40, Anthony Moretti wrote:
>>
>> CAUTION: This email originated outside the UCT network. Do not click any
>> links or open attachments unless you know and trust the source.
>>
>> Thanks for the example Marcel. Can’t the relations from the simple
>> representation and the complex representation coexist under the same
>> hypothetical “SUO” though?
>>
>> Anthony
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 8:46 AM Margaret Warren <mm@zeroexp.com> wrote:
>>
>>> That's a great idea, Dan..I would be willing to work on this.
>>>
>>> -------- Original message --------
>>> From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
>>> Date: 1/20/21 09:31 (GMT-05:00)
>>> To: Jos De Roo <josderoo@gmail.com>
>>> Cc: Hugh Glaser <hugh@glasers.org>, Patrick J Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>,
>>> Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
>>> Subject: Re: [EXT] Upper ontologies
>>>
>>> If it were in a wiki somewhere it could approximate a book...
>>>
>>> On Wed, 20 Jan 2021 at 13:45, Jos De Roo <josderoo@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Did exactly the same, appended Pat's posting to local file pat.txt
>>>> Thanks Pat !!!
>>>>
>>>> Jos
>>>>
>>>> -- https://josd.github.io/ <http://josd.github.io>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 1:34 PM Hugh Glaser <hugh@glasers.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Thanks Pat - an excellent and well-timed posting.
>>>>> I will save it for future use and savouring.
>>>>>
>>>>> I think that the discussion illustrates the problem.
>>>>> Upper Ontology is a concept.
>>>>> Some people conceive of it as singular.
>>>>> Others as plurality.
>>>>>
>>>>> > On 20 Jan 2021, at 06:17, 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
>>>>> >
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Hugh
>>>>> 023 8061 5652
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
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