Re: Cross-ontologies reasoning

At 19:11 -0500 12/29/03, Drew McDermott wrote:
>>  [Jim Hendler]
>>  If you and I are transacting business (or you are running a factory
>>  using a machine I manufactured) I don't see why we would need, or
>>  even want, to merge everything in our ontologies (for example, maybe
>>  you believe that Rush Limbaugh is a rational being and I cannot live
>>  with that belief)
>
>In my model of ontology merging, two inconsistent ontologies can't be
>merged; the result would have no models.
>
>But I don't see why a judgment one way or the other about the
>rationality of Rush Limbaugh would be a part of an ontology.  Perhaps
>there's a better example.
>
>                                              -- Drew

Ontology 1:
  beginTime(human) = conception.
  necessarilybefore(conception, birth).

Ontology 2:
  beginTime(human) = birth.
  necessarilybefore(conception, birth).

or, perhaps

KidsOntology
  IsReal(Santa).

AdultOntology
  IsConceptual(Santa)
  IsReal disjoint IsConceptual.

Or, go back to the one I use in many of my talks -- there exists (or 
used to exist) a web page claiming the number of cows in texas was 
zero because they had been replaced with alien entities.  There are 
other pages which claim the number is in the 100s of millions.  Both 
agree with some partial axiomization of what a cow is, but surely any 
naive merging of these would be inconsistent

-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)

Received on Thursday, 1 January 2004 15:40:22 UTC