Re: SUO: evil genie methodology
Mike,
Yes, an excellent point. We might say that in this exercise our
protagonist would fail to complete the job if he just named and related all
the instances in the world because his ontology would be "promiscuous" and
unwieldy, but that would be a secondary effect.
Adam
At 06:07 PM 8/31/2001 -0400, Mike Pool wrote:
>Adam,
>
>This doesn't strike me as getting at the most important problem of ontology
>development, although it is a way to ask whether one's axiomatizations are
>complete and correct.
>A bigger problem concerns choosing categories and relations that
>efficiently and/or plausibly represent the stuff in the world. This isn't
>necessarily a case of correctness or completeness. We can imagine, for
>instance, a very detailed ontology of trees such that almost every instance
>of tree in the world corresponds to a different type of tree or we can
>imagine an ontology that partitions the world into things that weight
>exactly 3.8971 kilograms and those that don't or classes like
>ThingsThatAreAMouseOrALincolnCarOrCorncobPipe which contains all and only
>those things that are mice or Lincoln cars or corncob pipes. Usually
>such categories are a bad idea, but I don't see that the errors committed
>permit the genie to create a world that differs radically from the one
>we're trying to represent. An important part of ontology development is
>getting things right (but I daresay that good knowledge engineering also
>involves knowing when to stop worrying about the evil genie and rein in
>one's axiom writing), but any fool can get things right, other significant
>ontology properties are simplicity, elegance and utility.
>
>best,
>
>Mike Pool
>
>At 01:15 PM 31/08/01 -0700, you wrote:
> >
> >Folks,
> > In a discussion with Fritz Lehmann he offered a very simple and elegant
> >methodology for constructing ontologies. I've reframed the analogy a bit
> >from his original but let's see what people think.
> > Imagine you are an ontologist who has an all powerful but mischievous
> >genie at your disposal. Your job is to create the world. The genie can
> >create the world however he sees fit as long as it is consistent with your
> >axioms. You get a lot of wishes since this is a hard job.
> > For your first ontology maybe you specify that events have timepoints
> >specifying their start and end. The genie then cackles gleefully and
> >creates a world in which events run backwards and end before they start
> >because you don't have an axiom that specifies that ending timepoints must
> >be later in time than beginning ones for the same event.
> > In fact, we're already doing this in a fashion. Anyone who proposes a
> >solution on this list is playing the role of our protagonist in the story,
> >and the masses are the collective evil (but ultimately benevolent) genie
> >trying to find flaws in the proposal.
> >
> >Adam
> >
> >
> >
> >Adam Pease
> >Teknowledge
> >(650) 424-0500 x571
> >
>
>
>________________________________
>Mike Pool
>Information Extraction & Transport, Inc.
>(703) 841-3500 x632
>(703) 841-3501 Fax
Adam Pease
Teknowledge
(650) 424-0500 x571