Re: SUO: *Date 04 Mar 2002 -- Content, Form, Function
At 08:37 AM 3/4/2002 -0500, Jon Awbrey wrote:
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>Content, Form, Function
>
>I meant to get back to these observations that
>John Sowa made, because I think that they are
>critically important to the proper conception
>of our task:
>
>JS: This raises the question of what we can standardize if
> we are not standardizing content. The answer is form:
> we should be focusing on formal ways of organizing all
> the ontological resources that are available, including
> SUMO, OpenCyc, IMPS, WordNet, EDR, etc.
>
>JS: IFF is an effort in that direction, but it has not been tested on
> actual content and applications. Having at least two rich content
> ontologies, such as OpenCyc and SUMO, should bring to the fore the
> question of how they can be mixed, matched, and used together.
>
>JS: I would like to open up all the other sources
> of content for consideration in this mélange.
>
>I would add these observations.
>
>Drawing the distinction between form and content is important
>because it is the line between what is our business and what
>is not our business. We simply have no business trying to
>redo the work of content experts and domain specialists.
>
I would appreciate it if you (Jon) and/or John Sowa could flesh out this
alleged content-form distinction a little bit; I'm afraid that I don't find
the word processor analogy sufficiently helpful.
To my mind there's not much in an ontology that is strictly form. I would
assume that logical operators and equality could be safely included and
without too much controversy, except from the set theory purists, we could
probably include notions of membership and subset on the form side. We
might also include the most general relationship categories, e.g.,
BinaryPredicate, BinaryFunction, and the vocabulary and rules for
articulating constraints on the arguments or domain and range of a
relation, but I think most would contend that we've already moved into
content here.
Does your position (and/or John Sowa's) on the SUO simply amount to a claim
that the IEEE ontology standardization effort should cover only the logical
operators, equality and basic notions of set theory? If so, I'll go one
further. These notions aren't in need of standardization, so if you're
correct that we should stay away from content I would contend that we
should just pack in the whole thing.
I feel like my question is a bit naive but I really don't know what the
"concentrate on form" proposal amounts to. Perhaps this has been
addressed in one of John Sowa's emails or papers. If so, please point me
there and I apologize for missing it on the first go round.
Maybe your answer(s) to this will help me to understand what Jon means by
"generic functions of conceptual work" below.
best regards,
Mike Pool
>To invoke the analogy between "concept processors" and word processors,
>our job is analogous to writing the specifications for a word processor,
>our is not the business of supplying ready-made term papers to students.
>
>Most of the domain knowledge that actually exists in the world is not yet
>in the above short list of "ontological resources" and much of the content
>that does reside in some of these sources would be just plain ridiculous to
>any specialists actually working in the supposedly covered domains.
>
>So I think that the list of "other sources" and the overall mix of
>ingredients in this mélange would need to be widened considerably
>beyond what's currently contained in these putative resources.
>
>To advert a potential misunderstanding that I can already see coming
>down the road, I am decidedly not saying that there is nothing left
>for us "meta, generic, abstract, philosophical" folks to do once the
>lion's share of content and domain cutlets have been carved off the
>corpus of the world's knowledge beast. What is left is precisely
>the form, and I would add the function, and those are the aspects
>of knowledge evolution that we should be working to facilitate.
>
>Again the analogy with word processors;
>the real design and spec questions are:
>
>1. What are the generic forms of conceptual content
> that concept users need to be supported in using?
>
>2. What are the generic functions of conceptual work?
> Which functions can be given supporting utilities?
>
>I think that those are the sorts of services that
>a standard ontology utility ought to be providing.
>
>Jon Awbrey
>
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________________________________
Mike Pool
Information Extraction & Transport, Inc.
(703) 841-3500 x632
(703) 841-3501 Fax