Re: SUO: Organizations/Positions
Adam --
Some further comments marked below as: *DM -
Adam Pease <apease@ks.teknowledge.com> on 09/04/2001 11:19:33 AM
To: Douglas McDavid/Boulder/IBM@IBMUS, Ian Niles <iniles@teknowledge.com>
cc: "Standard-Upper-Ontology (E-mail)" <standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>
Subject: Re: SUO: Organizations/Positions
*DM - big snip
>
>Now, it seems that you (Ian) are reaching a point of personal comfort,
>where you are wanting to introduce a small set of axioms into the
uppermost
>realm of human knowledge and concern (a standard, upper-level ontology).
> >From my point of view, what you are proposing is a thin, brittle set of
>concepts from a subdomain of what I have been talking about here.
I was with you until you described the ontology as "brittle". In a
physical system, something brittle breaks into pieces easily when stress is
applied. In an ontology, I would suggest that "stress" is the addition of
a new example or category of knowledge. "Breaking" would mean that drastic
reorganization of the ontology is required to accommodate the new
requirement. Any ontology will be incomplete with regard to some area of
knowledge so the question must be whether the ontology can be elaborated
rather than changed and reorganized. Our defense against brittleness is
the peer review process. If someone from the group comes up with a
concrete example that can't be accommodated that would be an indication of
brittleness.
*DM - I intended to use the term brittle in the sense I remember Doug Lenat
using when he talked about the purpose of Cyc, back in the mid-80's. This
is in sense that knowledge from one domain (say medical diagnosis) breaks
when applied to another domain (say auto mechanics). The example Doug gave
was a car with rust spots that was diagnosed as having the measles. My
point
about the organization and position discussion is that it is likely to
break
when applied to human social systems that are not in the commercial domain
that seems to be the focus of recent discussion.
*DM - snip
>On the basis of this, I'd like to raise the following questions for
>discussion:
>
>1. What is the method by which we assign certain concerns to the SUO
level
>and others to the level of subtending domain ontologies?
My preference would be for us to work on any reasonably general area of
knowledge (although this is certainly a fuzzy judgement) and worry later
about what to exclude. One approach as we reach a reasonably point of
stability would be simply to take only the top few thousand concepts and
consign the remainder to domain specific ontologies. The choice would be
an empirical one. I feel that arguments a priori about what to include or
exclude would be ungrounded and impossible to resolve.
*DM - My reading of a lot of the discussion over past months is that you
have
been very consistent in theis position, and this is consistently the source
of
a lot of the angst expressed by others about the method, or lack of method,
in the approach that is being taken with SUMO. I'm trying to sharpen this
debate, because it is at the heart of the part of the PAR that I personally
feel has the greatest hope of tractability in human lifetimes.
>2. How do we propose, over time, to address whole sets of concerns such
as
>the ones I have raised here?
I believe it would be for an individual or group to raise an issue about an
area of knowledge, proceed to more formal statements in English about a set
of concepts and then to propose formal axioms, consistent with SUMO or IFF
(or some other future proposal).
*DM - An alternative would be to consider a number of existing, and then
subsequently proposed, ontologies for how they are or are not able to
interface in an acceptable manner to the upper ontology. This would
require a definition of acceptable interface, which I am more and more
coming to believe is the crux of what might be possible to standardize.
>3. Is it part of our methodology to reduce very large domains to a
>minimalist set of concepts and axioms?
I would hope so. Our set of axioms should be as simple as possible but no
simpler. We can drive the development of axioms with examples. If
expression of a concrete example cannot be done in a particular ontology,
that should point to the change or elaboration that is needed.
*DM - Which begs the question of what does it mean "to be done" in an
ontology? My original note was prompted by the sense that some folks
believed
that having drawn this picture, with it's accompanying SUMO statements
>
> CognitiveAgent
> |
> |
> OrganizationUnit
> / \
> / \
> / \
>Organization Position
we had arrived at some point of "doneness" with respect to the subject of
human organizations. A lot of what I have snipped out from my original
note was to indicate how far I think this is from being done. "Doing" a
concrete example, in my mind, means that you can not only make some
statement that is uncontroversially true, but that you can fully explore
the meaning that is necessary for the task at hand. So, to say that a
Client Service Representative is a position and the Queen of England is
a position, while maybe acceptably true, the really interesting stuff is
all the dimensions along which these two things (and so many others) are
different. For those of us thinking about the uppermost realm of ontology
I think it is important to consider whether the uppermost ontology would
ever have all the concepts that would articulate these interesting
differences,
or is there a principled manner in which multiple domain-specific
ontologies
would be brought to bear on such matters.
>4. Do we want to subject each accepted set of terms and axioms to an
>evaluation against the terms of the PAR? For instance should we expect to
>be able to articulate how the set of terms below provides for:
> a) a framework for domain ontologies,
> b) interoperability of various applications,
> c) mapping of data elements,
> d) educational systems, and
> e) disambiguation of natural language statements?
I think this would be a reasonable exercise. In terms of the proposed
formalization of organizations:
a) the ontology could be expanded to handle legal frameworks or business
rules of specific organizations
*DM - Or, alternatively, the upper ontology could be refined to recognize
that
there are legal and business ontologies that need to be invoked, and the
mechanism by which it is possible to determine when and how to do so.
b) the ontology might support a set of back office IT systems that must
communicate with each other about supervisory, legal and financial
responsibilities within a complex company such as Shell.
*DM - Or a set of ontologies, operating together under a standard upper
mechanism might do so.
c) the ontology could be "compiled" into a relational database that
captures the terms and relations in the ontology, where the axioms serve as
formal definitions for the database metadata
*DM - Or a set of ontologies might be so compiled, with a compiled database
version of some upper level as a means of navigating the domain-specific
modules.
d) the ontology could support an educational simulation that employs legal
rules to advise a student on case studies in managmenet.
*DM - Which in my mind says that there are hundreds, if not thousands of
concepts and axioms in this intersection of law and management (two fairly
diverse domains that in your example need to interoperate). You keep
asking people to pledge allegiance to the PAR, but this, and almost
everything you say about SUMO, indicates to me that you don't personally
subscribe to the language in the PAR that talks about the SUO as a
structuring mechanism for a number of domain ontologies.
e) the ontology could support an information retrieval application that
allows retrieval of contractual and legal documents about the structure of
an organization. Precision would be improved beyond statistical algorithms
by allowing the user conducting a search to specify which types of
organizational relationships he or she is concerned with.
*DM - Once again, you say "*the* ontology", which is the main point of my
original note. I really think it is important for all of us to be thinking
in terms of "ontolog*ies*". I now realize this is at the heart of why I
abstained vis a vis SUMO, with a comment about methodology. Based on a
clearer understanding now of my discomfort, I would almost surely vote no
on the SUMO - not so much as a set of concepts and axioms that might have
a lot of interest, but as a proposed singularity where what is needed is a
mechanism to manage a multiplicity.
>I'm not asserting that these proposed additions to SUMO do not address the
>various goals of the PAR. I am just starting to think through for myself
>how this should all work, and particularly in the context of the IFF
>architecture that has now come under the control of the WG.
sounds good.
*DM - Well, maybe ... :-)
Adam
*DM - snipped the original note