Re: SUO: RE: ontology as science
Bill,
WB> Okay. I agree that lexicographers can treat language use as
> data and be as objective about its data analysis as any other
> scientist. I'll also accept that lexicographers can account
> for and predict semantic drift. But what are the ramifications
> of this on ontology design or engineering? (Specifically of
> the SUO.)
The major implication is that there exist testable methods and
criteria for guiding the selection of categories and the axioms
and definitions that define them. Following is the kind of
data that ontologists should take into consideration:
1. The selection of words that people have used to express
their thoughts have a strong correlation with the concepts
that are important for science, engineering, business, law,
medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, and everyday life.
2. The sounds that people assign to those concepts may vary
from one language to another, but the common semantic
features across different languages are important sources
of semantic distinctions that an ontology, especially an
upper-level ontology should be able to represent.
3. The concepts and theories of every scientific discipline
represent the best thoughts of highly trained people who
have examined the phenomena (and the existing things
those phenomena indicate) in many important fields.
These are sources of data that a good ontology should be able
to represent and organize in a coherent way. The IF framework
represents a collection of tools that can be used to analyze
such data, derive categories for classifying the entities,
and define those categories in more formal notations than
the usual natural language descriptions found in dictionaries.
The basic point is that the choice of categories is not
arbitrary and there are ways of evaluating the categories
and their definitions by objective criteria.
John