Re: SUO: RE: SUO Comment #2
I think Doug has brought up something potentialy quite important. I.e.,
What does 'upper' mean? Perhaps we could attempt to define this in our
scope and purpose statement? There are differences between abstract and generic,
for example, but there is also a relationship, in that more abstract things tend
to be more generic. Generic is also measured in teh eyes of the beholder. A term
that appears very very specific to some specialized domain, e.g. a partticular class
of bacteria, or of springs may indeed be viewed as highly generic, from workers in
those particular fields.
Mike
From owner-standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org Wed Aug 30 05:31:17 2000
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Subject: Re: SUO: RE: SUO Comment #2
To: "Schoening, James R CECOM DCSC4I" <James.Schoening@mail1.monmouth.army.mil>
Cc: "'standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org'" <standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>
From: "Douglas McDavid/Boulder/IBM" <mcdavid@us.ibm.com>
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 06:21:14 -0600
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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.
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?
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
".
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. There seems to be some
level of agreement that we are talking about an upper ontology of the
world, not an ontology of ontology. 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". 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. 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. 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 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.
Doug McDavid
Knowledge Deployment Manager,
Multi-Industry Practice - Business Innovation Services - IBM, US
Certified Executive Consultant
Member of IBM Academy of Technology
mcdavid@us.ibm.com -- 916-549-4600
"Schoening, James R CECOM DCSC4I" <James.Schoening@mail1.monmouth.army.mil>
@ieee.org on 08/29/2000 08:25:09 PM
Sent by: owner-standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
To: "'standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org'"
<standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>
cc:
Subject: SUO: RE: SUO Comment #2
Could anyone shed some light on this issue? Patrick Cassidy has suggested
that a 20,000+ term general purpose ontology (which could follow SUO)
should
be able to describe ALL terms found in middle and lower ontologies.
Mike Uschold questions whether this is feasible.
Can anyone speak to this?
It will be good to address this, but it also probably isn't that critical.
All we are saying is that SUO should provide an adequate base for a larger
general purpose ontology, but we don't need to define the Scope and Purpose
for that larger ontology at this time. But anyway, let's still address it.
Jim Schoening
-----Original Message-----
From: mfu@redwood.rt.cs.boeing.com
To: James.Schoening@mail1.monmouth.army.mil
Sent: 08/10/2000 18:04
Subject: Re: SUO Comment #2
> * This standard will enable the development of a large (20,000+)
> general-purpose standard ontology of common concepts to be
> developed, which will provide the basis for [defining all of the
concepts
> in] middle-level domain ontologies and lower-level
> application ontologies.
'all' may be rather a tall order. It is certainly a worthy long term
aim, but
it may not be attainable in practice. There may always be interesting
concepts that don't seem to fit anywhere. At best, we might
asymptotically
approach this goal.
On the other hand, I could be overly pessimestic here -- I wonder what
the
CYC experience is here, perhaps it is an attainable goal.
Comments?
Mike