Re: Reflections on SUO-KIF Ontology
My apologies to the group for sending a copy of Robert Kent's message
to the whole group. I was attempting to send a copy only to him,
asking about the URL that he quoted, since I had problems getting
to that page.
Since I'm sending a message of apology, I thought it would be
useful to summarize the questions I raised in my previous
mail message. I'd like to see some discussion on the group
because I see that they will shape some of our efforts.
1) Do we want to have the vocabulary of KIF (or whatever
notation we use to express the SUO) in the ontology ?
It seems that this could be useful, but would need some kind of
semantics similar to Kripke's language and cascading metalanguages.
2) Will we have an element such as "Thing" or "top" as the uppermost
element in the ontology ?
3) Do we want to update the BNF at
http://ltsc.ieee.org/suo/suo-kif.html
to include the syntax:
(forall ((?ANY !Class)) ...)
4) Do we want me make a distinction between being a
member of a set and being an instance of a collection?
This distinction does exist in the Upper Cyc Ontology.
The argument in a nutshell is that a #$SetOrCollection
would have subclasses, one for #$Set-Mathematical,
which has no restrictions on membership, and the
other #$Collection which requires that all members
are of the same 'kind'.
5) If a relation R for argument n has
(nth-domain n R Class) or
statements defined, should we either include the
(instance-of ArgN ClassN) statements in implications ?
or use (forall ((?ArgN ClassN)) ... syntax ?
The advantage to doing so is that it clarifies
the statements for an new reader and it makes
explicit information that is not quickly available.
It is not logically necessary, because any statement
in a knowledge base must pass these argument restrictions
before being incorporated into the knowledge base.
6) What is the status of the simple axioms defining
the meaning of numbers and strings ?
7) Do we want to support predicates with a variable
number of arguments?
8) How do we want to handle statements that
refer to other statements ?
9) Are we going to have explicit quoting in the syntax
for the SUO, or do we want to define this as part
of the arguments restrictions for a relation ?
10) Do we want relations that explicitly refer to
well formedness or the truth value of an Assertion ?
David (whitten@netcom.com)