Re: SUO: Vote 2001-02: IFF Foundation Ontology
Robert,
One way to help show the relevance and accessibility of the IFF ontology would be to give some examples of how to code the information expressed in common English statements in IFF.
I did something similar in the series of "Hamlet" examples in the message copied below, as well as the dialog with Josiane Caron-Pargue also copied below.
Adam, let me take you up on this, since you obligingly give concrete examples. You say that you are showing how to encode information expressed in common English statements. What I see, however, are some formal names (which are really only character strings as they stand) plus a few axioms, mostly just placing these in some kind of classification heirarchy (named with other character strings), plus some attached English text which makes some very bold statements about what those character strings 'mean'. What that English text ought to say is that this is what the formal strings are *intended* to mean. What they *actually* mean, if anything, is whatever can be inferred by a valid first-order reasoner from the axioms that are provided, and that is ALL. All the rest is hope and aspirations and hand-waving.
As documentation of the intentions of the ontology designers, and as a guide for those who extend the ontology in enough detail so that it might actually come some way to realizing the aspirations of its designers, such pieces of 'guiding prose' are valuable and indeed essential; I do not mean to suggest that writing these things is easy or pointless. But this process of documenting one's thoughts (no matter how precise they are) in English paragraphs is not in itself the creation of an ontology, and does not create any actual formal content.
The problem with this particular area, as you may know, is that some of the best minds have conspicuously failed to come up with usable, broadly accepted, precise theories of what 'intentionality' is, or what 'content' might be when applied to things like works of fiction; so the gap between asserting that something means:
"An instance of &%Physical that &%represents something else. Note that this is an intentional relation - instances of &%Physical that accidentally convey some meaning to an &%Agent would not be examples of &%Representations."
and actually writing logical axioms that capture the English meanings of "represents", "convey meaning" and "intentional", is likely to be rather large. But without those axioms, to claim that one has 'coded the information' is just plain wrong.
Pat
PS. On another matter, you and Josiane may find it illuminating to review the writings of Melissa Bowerman, eg
Bowerman, M. (1996). Learning how to structure space for language: A crosslinguistic perspective. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel, & M.F. Garrett (Eds.), Language and space
(pp. 385-436). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
but see also the website of the Nijmegen MaxPlanckInstitute (look under 'space' in the annual reports)
PPS. A few more comments/questions are inserted into the later text.
Folks,
We had some discussion a few months back about how to represent and
relate informational content of books and performances. Ian and I discussed this topic again, relative to the semiotics terms he sent out to the list recently. The examples I suggested below can now be formalized as follows
Hamlet the fictional character
(instance-of Hamlet Human)
What distinguishes real humans from fictional humans? Did Hamlet have a (fictional) liver, for example? What about things like Peter Pan and Barney?
Hamlet an edition of the printed play
(subclass-of Hamlet-FolgerEdition ContentBearingObject)
(subclass-of Hamlet-ScribnerEdition Hamlet-FolgerEdition)
(equivalentContentClass Hamlet-ScribnerEdition Hamlet-FolgerEdition)
(instance-of Hamlet-ScribnerEditionOnMyBookshelf Hamlet-ScribnerEdition)
(containsInformation Hamlet-ScribnerEditionOnMyBookshelf Hamlet-ThePlay)
A performance of Hamlet
(instance-of HamletPerformanceByRoyalShakespeareCompanyOnJune18-2000
Activity)
(instance-of HamletPerformanceByRoyalShakespeareCompanyOnJune18-2000
ContentBearingProcess)
(realization-of HamletPerformanceByRoyalShakespeareCompanyOnJune18-2000
Hamlet-ThePlay)
A performance of Hamlet captured on video and encoded as a bit stream
(instance-of
VideotapeOfHamletPerformanceByRoyalShakespeareCompanyOnJune18-2000
ContentBearingObject)
(refers-to
VideotapeOfHamletPerformanceByRoyalShakespeareCompanyOnJune18-2000
HamletPerformanceByRoyalShakespeareCompanyOnJune18-2000)
(instance-of
BitStreamOfHamletPerformanceByRoyalShakespeareCompanyOnJune18-2000
ContentBearingPhysical)
(equivalentContentInstance
VideotapeOfHamletPerformanceByRoyalShakespeareCompanyOnJune18-2000
BitStreamOfHamletPerformanceByRoyalShakespeareCompanyOnJune18-2000)
The text of Hamlet as character strings
(subclass-of Hamlet-CharacterStrings ContentBearingObject)
What Fritz Lehmann has called a "conceptual work" - the timeless
informational content of the play
(instance-of Hamlet-ThePlay Proposition)
Proposition??? (Is Hamlet true or false?)
Note that these examples suggest four new semiotics notions, which can be
defined as follows:
Again, these aren't *definitions*.
(subclass-of Representation Physical)
(documentation Representation "An instance of &%Physical that
&%represents something else. Note that this is an intentional relation -
instances of &%Physical that accidentally convey some meaning to an &%Agent
would not be examples of &%Representations.")
Intentionality is a VERY tricky concept; but in any case, if you are going to involve the intentions, shouldn't the person who had the intention - the composer of the representation - be involved in the definition somewhere?
(=>
(instance-of ?OBJ Representation)
(exists (?ENTITY)
(represents ?OBJ ?ENTITY)))
(subclass-of ContentBearingProcess Representation)
(relatedInternalConcept ContentBearingObject realization-of)
(documentation ContentBearingProcess "Any &%Process that expresses a
&%Proposition. It is important to distinguish &%Propositions from the
&%ContentBearingProcesses that express them. A &%Proposition is a piece of
information, e.g. that the cat is on the mat, but a &%ContentBearingProcess
is
an &%Process that realizes this information. A &%Proposition is an
abstraction
that may have multiple representations: performances, sounds, bit streams,
etc.")
(=>
(instance-of ?PROCESS ContentBearingProcess)
(exists (?PROP)
(realization-of ?PROCESS ?PROP)))
Great. I was going to ask you what you meant by "realizes" in the English prose, and I find that it is an undefined term in the axiom as well. (What is to stop me understanding 'realization-of' to refer to, say, equality? That would make your (sole) axiom true.)
(subrelation-of equivalentContentInstance subsumesContentInstance)
(instance-of equivalentContentInstance EquivalenceRelation)
(nth-domain equivalentContentInstance 1 Representation)
(nth-domain equivalentContentInstance 2 Representation)
(documentation equivalentContentInstance "A binary relation between two
instances of Representation. '(equivalentContent ?OBJ1 ?OBJ2)' means that
the content expressed by ?OBJ1 is identical with the content expressed by
?OBJ2. An example would be the relationship between a handwritten draft of
a letter to my lawyer and a typed copy of the same letter.
How about a translation of the letter into Spanish?
Note that
'(equivalentContentInstance ?OBJ1 ?OBJ2)' implies '(subsumesContent ?OBJ1
?OBJ2)' and '(subsumesContent ?OBJ2 ?OBJ2)'.")
(instance-of subsumesContentInstance PartialOrderingRelation)
(nth-domain subsumesContentInstance 1 Representation)
(nth-domain subsumesContentInstance 2 Representation)
(documentation subsumesContent "A binary relation between two instances of
Representation. '(subsumesContent ?OBJ1 ?OBJ2)' means that the content
expressed by ?OBJ1 contains the content expressed by ?OBJ2.
??But what does that mean? I have no idea what it means to say that one content 'contains' another. Do you mean 'entails', ie the subsumed can be inferred from the subsumer?
An example is
the relationship between a handwritten poem and one of its stanzas.
You mean between the handwritten text of the poem and the subtext of one of its stanzas, right? But that's an easy case, since you have divided the physical thing in a way that corresponds to a conceptual division. What happens if I tear a letter into strips, rendering each piece illegible: does the content of the letter subsume that of one strip?
It would be better to come up with a kind of simple mereology *of content itself* (ie what it means for one piece of content - proposition? - to be 'part' of another), I think, and then define the physical relations in terms of the induced content relations. You could probably get a long way with a very simple theory of content as a kind of abstract stuff, and apply simple mereology to it. It would differ from the stuff described by normal mereology only by having no physical properties but a special relationship (being 'about') to parts of a possible physical world.
Pat Hayes
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