Re: SUO: Maintenance - related issues
Graham wrote:
> I think John has aired some important points below, which hedge
> around my stance that the benefits of the current thrusts will be
> minor compared to that achievable if the SUO structure focuses on
> the formats of an unambiguous adaptation of natural language.
It is good that you recognize you would need an "adaptation" of
natural language. To eliminate ambiguity adequately and achieve the
clarity necessary to ensure undertanding of an ontology -- notably,
the logical properties of, and relations among, its constitutent
concepts -- you will have to regiment natural language to an extent
that, in effect, your "adaptaton" is a first-order language.
> The SUO is currently instead heading down the road of becoming a
> highly symbolic ontology that will be very foreign and unreadable to
> the average lay person.
Like most any engineering model with the rigor needed to perform its
intended function.
> I think this line of development arises naturally out of eliciting
> support from admittedly keen logicians, who understandably want to
> stick to their familiar "symbo-logical" structures, because that is
> where they feel at home.
Logicians speak natural languages pretty well too. Familiarity has
nothing to do with it. To this point, ontologies have chiefly been
designed to play a central role in a certain type of computer
application, namely, the representation, management (searching,
reasoning, etc), and sharing of information. To play this role, the
clarity and precision of logical languages are essential. Perhaps you
have other applications in mind that don't require this sort of
precision. But that does not undermine the need for a formal SUO for
computational applications.
> However, I feel this means it will remain buried in the secret files
> of industry designers and software developers, and probably not even
> of managers.
No secrets here; it will be a public standard. And far more
accessible than many mathematically oriented standards. (My better
freshman students can translate proficiently into first-order logic
after 3 months of biweekly classes.)
> The main benefit I see from a "natural language based SUO" would be
> a greater clarity of logical implications of situations and devices
> (both physical and conceptual) to the average person across
> societies and populations around the globe. I would include in
> conceptual devices those that are educational, legal and
> sociological, so I suggest the benefits would extend right across
> society.
I wouldn't want to discount any of these. But again, the project you
envision is entirely orthogonal to the development of a formal SUO.
However, the problems and limitations of data dictionaries and other
natural language based "technologies" do not augur well for your
project.
> A small example of the benefits I could see from a "natural language
> based SUO" could be a release from the frustrations of the current
> unintuitive and inconsistent behaviour of Windows, which many of us
> have to tolerate every day.
http://www.linux.org. ;-)
Highest regards,
-chris
--
Christopher Menzel # web: philebus.tamu.edu/~cmenzel
Philosophy, Texas A&M University # net: chris.menzel@tamu.edu
College Station, TX 77843-4237 # vox: (979) 845-8764