SUO: Re: Inquiry Driven Ontology Development
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JA = Jon Awbrey
JS = Jim Schoening
JS: Let's take this posting as an example. Please explain how this relates
to any SUO work. And please don't say that it relates to ontology or
even an upper ontolgy, unless there's some direct link to documents
being worked on. For example, if you've proposed standards words
to one of the documents, you could then ask for a review. And
please also use simple English.
JS: I'm also curious. Did you provide comments to the IFF document?
If so, you comments will be resolved via the list.
JA: First, a comment. We have seen repeated assurances from you, in response
to the widespread misgivings -- are they really misgivings? -- of others
that the status of "working documents" as "working documents" does not
constrain our discussions or limit debate in any additional way,
as if the phrase "working document" were to be interpreted to
mean the sole topic that the group is licensed or permitted
to work on. If you are now saying different, I think that
would radically change the way that members of the group
view these "working documnets", and that it would also
violate the understanding that most members had about
these documents when they voted on them.
JA: In the spirit of "first things first" and "one thing at a time",
I will stop here and see if we can get this issue clarified
before moving on.
JS: <pending>
Alright, maybe it's best to work concurrently, after all.
The following note is one in a series of several by me.
It continues a line of thought and a point of view that
I have maintained "consistently" (= "repeatedly") since
my first days in this forum, 1.5 yrs ago. It takes its
place in a context of discussion among many members that
is rather well established within this group, amounting
to a tradition, almost. If I had to sum up the gist of
this tradition in a single motto, I might try something
like "Process Precedes Product" (P^3).
To folks of the P^3 persuasion, it is ludicrous to think that the
present working group, or even one vastly more well endowed, with
expertise and funding both, can sit down and crank out by ungloved
hand a significantly useful ontology that would be any much better
than a similar company of pre-socratics might have done, and did.
The fact that anyone in the year 2001 would be contemplating a try
at such work without first acquiring or building the computational
tools to do the job is utterly comical and totally flabbergasting.
But we have wearied of trying to get this across to the diehards,
and we know that this delusion will not get its proper dunking
until its champions place their maintaining body weights on
the plank of a practical and a realistic test of conceit.
So we are anxious to get to that phase, of trying out
prototype systems on meaningfully complex test sets.
In the meantime, there is very little of a positive nature
that we P^3 n-cubi can do toward the goals of this endeavor
but to continue developing an alternative line of inquiry,
just in case the dunkees in the horse laughitudes discover
themselves in dire need of testy line one day, like we know
that they will, sooner or later.
The note below is one in long line of contributions
to that alternative course of ontology development.
I will explain its pertinence in more detail later.
Jon Awbrey
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>
> Subj: Inquiry Driven Ontology Development
> Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 15:26:49 -0500
> From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
> To: Stand Up Ontology <standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>
>
> This time I will take up the differential aspect
> of inquiry as a dynamic process of theory change.
>
> | Note on Relevance & Utility of Miniature Models:
> |
> | For reasons of the briefest possible exposition,
> | I have elected to discuss the subject matter in
> | the medium of a just barely non-trivial example.
> | In order to appreciate the point and the thrust
> | of any such radically impoverished test example
> | it is necessary to recognize the application of
> | one or two limiting principles to the axiomatic
> | expressions of its thus-purported circumstances:
> |
> | 1. Gensym Fallacy. The sense and the significance of
> | the circumstantial description is circumscribed by
> | the logical form and the number of terms it enjoys.
> |
> | 2. Ginseng Truism. The sense and the significance of
> | the circumstantial description is circumscribed by
> | the logical form and the number of terms it enjoys.
> |
> | In particular, even though it is bound to appear for the moment that
> | I am restricting my presentation to "axiom change operators" (ACO's)
> | that act locally on the points of a given logical configuration in
> | a fixed lattice of propositional facts or terms, it will be clear
> | that a "zeroth order theory" (ZOT) that is presented by a finite
> | set of "zeroth order axioms" (ZOA) is itself equivalent to the
> | conjunction of these axioms, and thus to a single proposition
> | in the appropriate "zeroth order ordering" (ZOO). In effect,
> | one whole ZOO is encapsulated by a single point in another.
> |
> | Anyway, I think that is right, but it's a thought whose
> | consequences I am still struggling to grasp fully, and
> | so maybe I will eventually discover a problem with it.
>
> Returning to the example in question, let me now draw
> a more expansive picture of the "Rainy Day" situation,
> one that adduces to the account some consideration of
> what our peripatetic or precipitate hero was probably
> doing and thinking, however consciously or other-wise,
> just slightly before the imaginary events in question.
>
> You see, our hero did not begin his life with the
> shock of cool air on his skin, well, not on this
> particular, late ambulatory occasion, but had
> a prior distribution of default assumptions
> about what his day was going to be like.
>
> Just to extrapolate in a plausible vein of our imagination,
> let us play along and say that the initial facts were thus:
>
> A_1 = Air warm
>
> B_1 = Balmy day
>
> C_1 = Clear sky
>
> Pulling the "conventional contingency" or "customary connection" trick,
> let us then relativize the array of this data in the following fashion:
>
> C = Current situation
>
> C => A_1
>
> C => B_1
>
> C => C_1
>
> For the moment, let this figure of a "current situation" C
> be one that is allowed to "go with the flow", letting its
> letter be re-used to anchor whatever the case may become.
>
> Now I do not know if it has to be the case that these three
> features of the current situation had ever been entertained
> by our ambler in any particular order, but we might suppose
> their relative consistency as consisting in some such scene
> as this: The hiker has formed a prior assumption about the
> Case that applies to the current situation, let's say, that
> the day is balmy, C => B_1, an assumption that he will keep
> as a default to continue in the same way until there arises
> a reason to think otherwise. Further, we may imagine quite
> plausibly that a Rule of the form B_1 => A_1 can be applied
> to the Case C => B_1 to deduce the expectation of a certain
> Fact, namely, that the current situation will feature among
> its phenomena the qualities of the air being warm, C => A_1.
>
> So this logical set-up, or the likes of it, is what we may assume,
> at least, plausibly enough for our currently illustrative purpose,
> as the logical environ into which our soon to be inquiring ambler
> strolls one fine and for the moment sunny day.
>
> The rest you know. The cooler air, A_2, sensually contests
> and logically contradicts the continuing assumption of the
> prior condition A_1, demanding a fresh evaluation of the
> conditioning assumption B_1, altering it into the new
> hypothesis B_2, boding rain, which abduced Case is
> corrobated to a moderate degree by looking up and
> spying a cloud in the sky, C_2.
>
> Figure 1 manages to sum it all up in a fairly consummate fashion:
>
> | A_1 A_2 C_1 C_2
> | o~~~~~>~~~~~o o~~~~~>~~~~~o
> | \ /
> | \* * * */
> | \ /
> | \ * * * * /
> | \ /
> | \ * * * * /
> | \ /
> | \ * . * /
> | \ /
> | \ * * * * /
> | \ /
> | \ B_1 o~~~~~>~~~~~o B_2 /
> | \ * * /
> | \ /
> | \ * * /
> | \ /
> | \ * * /
> | \ /
> | \ * * /
> | \ /
> | \ * * /
> | \ /
> | \*/
> | o
> | C
> |
> | Figure 1. Sign of Rain, The Prequel
> |
> | A_1 = Air warm, A_2 = Air cool,
> | B_1 = Balmy day, B_2 = Bodes rain,
> | C_1 = Clear sky, C_2 = Cloudy sky,
> |
> | C = Current situation.
>
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