SUO: Re: ontology as science
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John,
My question is: Is anybody here ready to quit bkue-skying
this and get serious about the sort of things you say below?
Jon
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John F. Sowa wrote:
>
> 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
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