Re: SUO: Program Semantics
On 3/29/02 17:07, "Party of Citizens" <citizens@vcn.bc.ca> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 29 Mar 2002, John F. Sowa wrote:
>
>> 1. The problems of knowledge soup (Ch. 6 of my 2000 book or Ch. 7
>> of my 1984 book) are fundamental to the way people think, and
>> they must be accommodated by any cognitive agent or reasoning
>> system that has any hope of attaining the flexibility of human
>> reasoning (or even a rough approximation to it).
>
> clip
>
> I like that..."knowledge soup". My work, over the years includes a decade
> as a psychologist in a mental institution. People can say the darndest
> things. They can say almost anything under a given set of circumstances
> (stimulus conditions). There's your "flexibility" in human language.
> Put a word or symbol on the computer screen. Somebody, somewhere, will
> follow it with any other word or symbol.
Folks,
This is all great and fascinating stuff. But does any of it have relevance
to the chartered purpose of this list?
This is NOT a general discussion on AI, human cognition, or NLP - all of
which are enthralling and worthy subjects, about which I care a great deal.
But If the term "Ontology" becomes conflated with those terms, then all is
lost. There will be no progress.
As a reminder of what we ought to be doing, here is the description of the
standard activity from http://suo.ieee.org/:
===
Description of Target Standard: This standard will specify an upper
ontology that will enable computers to utilize it for applications such as
data interoperability, information search and retrieval, automated
inferencing, and natural language processing. An ontology is similar to a
dictionary or glossary, but with greater detail and structure that enables
computers to process its content. An ontology consists of a set of concepts,
axioms, and relationships that describe a domain of interest. An upper
ontology is limited to concepts that are meta, generic, abstract and
philosophical, and therefore are general enough to address (at a high level)
a broad range of domain areas. Concepts specific to given domains will not
be included; however, this standard will provide a structure and a set of
general concepts upon which domain ontologies (e.g. medical, financial,
engineering, etc.) could be constructed.
===
Now, isn't there enough here to debate over without talking about NLP, or
Montague, or Wittgenstein's or Peirce's views on human language competence
and/or performance????
C'mon folks. Try to stay focused. Many people have fled from this group
because of its lack of focus and tolerance of crackpot rantings. Haven't
you all noted the conspicuous absence of many bright people who at one time
contributed regularly? I'm going to join that group very soon.
I will make one last plea for relevance - If you don't want talk about doing
what's mentioned in the description above, take your discussions offline.
.bill