SUO: Re: SUO Comment #2
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Douglas McDavid/Boulder/IBM wrote:
>
> Jim --
>
> I'd like to say a few words in response to your question.
>
> I think part of our problem in this discussion may be a lack of
> shared agreement about what a Standard Upper Ontology is, or would be.
> I suspect that of the 40-plus contributors to this list, there are at
> least that many somewhat, and even wildly divergent understandings of
> what an SUO should be and how it would be used.
Thinking cybernetically, the following questions come to mind:
1. How could we formalize and measure, qualify and quantify,
the "degree of collaboration" or the "state of consensus"
that exists at any given time in a group's dynamics?
2. What operators do we have available to us for moving from states
of low collaborative potential and highly divergent "dissensus"
to the sorts of consensus that make collective action coherent?
> At the heart of this problem is a shared understanding of
> what _Upper_ means, in the phrase "Standard Upper Ontology".
> This term implies directionality to something that is essentially
> directionless. I've been known to assert that "Information does not
> obey the law of gravity". At some point we need to understand whether
> upper means generic, or whether upper means abstract, or whether upper
> means ubiquitous, or whether upper means meta, or just exactly what
> does "upper" mean?
It's the opposite of "downer" ...
Seriously folks, let me try to formalize the alternative possibilities
that Doug McDavid mentions. I will start out in the following way,
just as an experiment with notation, nothing more:
1. "upper" -<- "abstract"
2. "upper" -<- "generic"
3. "upper" -<- "meta"
4. "upper" -<- "ubiquitous"
5. "upper" -<- ???
Here, I am using the "chicken scratch" operator "-<-" in a way
that is deliberately generic or even vague, whose meaning is
decidely TBA, that is, meant to be specified at a later point,
and relative to the purposes of a particular application, but
for now we can take it roughly to mean "falls under", as in
"falls under the heading of".
> One of the things it could mean is "meta". There is a whole set
> of concepts that are important to us as a group of ontologists.
> These are concepts that we use in the course of building and
> manipulating ontologies. This includes things like terms,
> axioms, operators, notation, predicates, theories, negation,
> conjunction, theories, proofs, identities, properties, etc., etc.
> These are important considerations that have been much discussed in
> this forum. We would make a lot of progress if we could consider an
> exhaustive set of such concepts, and agree on the subset that provide
> a consistent and complete framework for doing the kind of ontological
> work that we envision. This is an ontology for ontologists - carving
> the world of ontology into the parts from which more complex concepts
> are composed. Such a meta-ontology might help to address part of the
> stated purpose of the SUO: "provides definition for general-purpose
> terms and provides a structure for compliant lower level domain
> ontologies".
Here, Doug McDavid picks out one possibility for further consideration.
I might try to informally formalize this choice among options as follows:
DMcD : "upper" -<- "meta"
In doing this, I am thinking along the lines of function notations
like "f : X -> Y" and "f : x |-> y", which I notice in passing are
notations for three-place relations.
> From the point of view of other ontologies, the meta level is actually
> epistemological. So, although it is important to our work, it may not
> be what anyone really has in mind for the SUO itself.
One day, most likely, this work of ours will not seem quite so exciting to
us as it does right now, and when that day comes, as it almost always does,
we will want to think about how to turn over all of this meta-stuff to the
end-user of the system. I think that we probably ought to think ahead,
and anticipate the kinds of issues that will arise in that transition.
> There seems to be some level of agreement that we are talking
> about an upper ontology of the world, not an ontology of ontology.
Is not the making of ontologies an activity that goes on in the world?
> From this point of view, the word upper makes us want to start from "Top".
> This, in turn tends to force a particular kind of abstraction. What is at
> the top, is generally something like "thing".
Apparently, it is not so lonely at the top as everybody seems to say!
For numerous other people put "things" like activities, businesses,
concerns, firms, forms, processes, purposes, and many other not so
successfully reifiable "things" at the top of their lists.
Can we not say that anything that one can talk about and think about
is an "object" of discussion and reasoning? If so, then an "object"
is that by virtue of its role in relation to signs, and not by dint
of any special essence, nature, or substance.
> One level down we get concepts like tangible thing and intangible
> thing, and then animate and inanimate things. From this point of
> view we should address concerns about what is allowable to make
> distinctions at the topmost level. Can we accept classes that
> would contain _identifiable_ things, or do we have a set of
> _properties_ that can be applied in a standardized manner to
> things that are only identifiable via more domain-specific
> ontological constructs?
>
> To me, the most useful piece of work we could provide would be
> a principled articulation of categories that are immediately
> applicable to identifiable things in the world. By principled,
> I mean that we would argue about whether each category in the SUO
> should be completely disjoint from all others, and whether the set
> of categories should be all-encompassing of all possible domains
> of concern to users of the SUO.
Then we would have to consider the ontology of concerns, that is,
the "ontology of objectives" (OOO), as a part of answering what is
the "overall objective of ontology" (OOOO). That makes sense to me.
> We have had some of this discussion in threads about space and time,
> and whether we are concerned that relativity indicates that these are
> not disjoint categories. We could talk about matter and energy, and
> whether quantum physics causes us a problem of disjointness here.
And do not forget the relativity of ontology (as a story about being)
with regard to the contigency of an "interpretive framework" (IF),
if not to mention with respect to the commonly silent chorus of
a particular "community of inquiry" (COI). And, of course,
nothing about this form of relativity prevents the discovery
of provisional approximations to the providential invariants
of Nature.
> I think we should have a discussion about the ontology of systems,
> and whether it would provide a service to the community at large
> for us to create a taxonomy of systems.
I am much in favor, myself, of shifting discourse to the level of systems.
> I think if we could reach an agreement on what we mean by "upper",
> it would go a long way toward clarifying the issue of how big the
> SUO should be, because we would all understand the kinds of concepts
> that would be accepted into the SUO and the kinds that would be reserved
> for other ontological constructs.
Ah! Clarity! Now there's a quest!
If only we could measure it the way
that we mete out our meta-information.
Jon
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