RE: SUO: ontology areas for review
Hi John,
Thanks for the comments. See my replies below.
-Ian
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Bateman [mailto:bateman@uni-bremen.de]
> Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2002 1:49 PM
> To: Adam Pease
> Cc: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> Subject: Re: SUO: ontology areas for review
>
>
>
> > LinguisticExpression
> >
> <http://ontology.teknowledge.com:8080/rsigma/SKB.jsp?req=SC&sk
> b=SUMO&id=127>
> >
> <http://ontology.teknowledge.com:8080/rsigma/SKB.jsp?req=SC&sk
> b=SUMO&id=127>
> >
> >
> >
> > For each area, we'd like to know
> > - what terms do you think are missing and should be added?
> > - what additional axioms should be added to flesh out the
> semantics
> > of the existing terms?
> > - are any axioms incorrect, or overly specific?
>
>
> OK....
>
> why are ConstructedLanguage and ComputerLanguage not in a
> subclass relation:
> or is ConstructedLanguage restricted to a constructed
> HumanLanguage (which
> is cute and Esperanto-friendly, but maybe not true?)
That's right. A 'ConstructedLanguage' is an artificial language that is
intended to be used for communication between humans, while a
'ComputerLanguage' is an artificial language that is intended to be used by
computers. Of course, this suggests that a superclass like
'ArtificialLanguage' might be useful in the SUMO. I'll go ahead and add it
if there are no objections.
>
> how can Sentence be a subclass of Clause? A sentence can
> consist of a whole
> bunch of clauses and a few other things too.... different
> modes such as
> spoken
> (does this have sentences? where are intonational phrases?)
> and written
> are not distinguished... Maybe
> a confusion between orthographic sentences (which can be weird) and
> the notion in the SUMO of sentence as that unit which can
> have a truth
> value?
> ... which is in any case not captured in "A syntactically well-formed
> formula of a &%Language."
> Standard problems with the notion of sentences as parts of
> texts.... even
> if this is a mereological part relation... as texts are expressed
> through sentences (sometimes) rather than being
> built up of them. Is the "realization" relationship a
> mereological part?
> (That is, words may be built up of sequences of phonemes, but they
> express/realize sequences of morphemes: morphemes do not have
> phonemes as parts, etc.(if one still believes in such things
> of course)).
I'm not sure I follow all of this. The assertion '(subclass Sentence
Clause)' is a goof, and I'll delete it from the SUMO.
>
> Text: ( documentation
> <http://ontology.teknowledge.com:8080/rsigma/SKB.jsp?req=SC&sk
>b=SUMO&id=32>
>Text
><http://ontology.teknowledge.com:8080/rsigma/SKB.jsp?req=SC&skb=SUMO&id=661
>
>"A &%Phrase, &%Sentence or set of &%Sentences that perform a specific
>function related to &%Communication, e.g. express a discourse about a
>particular topic.")
>Does a "newspaper" fit here? Or an encyclopedia? Presumably not;
>so would they be collections of texts? But surely these are not
>"upper".... (but why is "article"?).
Newspapers, encylopedias, books, articles, etc. are all intended to be
examples of 'Texts'. It's true that this implies that some 'Texts' are
comprised of other 'Texts', but I don't see that there's any problem here.
Note that this notion of 'Text' is meant to mirror the SUMO notion of
'Proposition'. 'Propositions' cover content of any size from that expressed
by single sentences to that conveyed by an entire volume, and 'Texts' cover
all of the physical representations of this content.
>Makes me wonder what this bit of the ontology is meant to be doing... what
>work will it do? Which goes back to questions raised on this list about
this
>area again.
>Any construction in this area is going to be theory-laden: perhaps a
further
>argument against the one-top-ontology-fits-all? Although I belong to the
>"nice its there" camp rather than the "no use trying" one! :-)
>John Bateman.