Re: SUO: RE: Re: ontology as science
Jon and Julian,
You're both right. Jon's statement is true of any monolithic
ontology, such as SUMO. Julian's requirements can be and are
being supported by Cyc -- and they must be supported by any SUO
we may develop.
>JA: ... but there is just no way of mushing togther a research
>oriented ontology with a general info, person in the street, journalistic
>ontology, without generating more mush, and there is no way of deriving
>scientific knowledge from popular (mis-)conceptions without radically
>changing common sense concepts in the process.
Cyc supports both popular and scientific world views by using
modules, which they call "microtheories". "Fairy tale"
examples include their microtheories on vampires and Greek
mythology (which are necessary for understanding references
in many texts, both popular and scientific).
But an even better example is their use of microtheories to
accommodate a dialog between a physician and a patient, who
must communicate to solve a problem, but who have radically
different terminology and concepts for characterizing the case.
Such examples occur in every branch of science and engineering
when the "gear heads" have to talk to the people who pay the
bills. They also occur in discussions between scientists who
have different opinions and hypotheses about the same data.
To handle such mismatches, Cyc has defined 6,000 microtheories,
and they have the mechanisms for dynamically creating new ones
during a single conversation (or even a single sentence).
Following is Julian's response, which I completely agree with.
We might not need 6,000 microtheories in the SUO, but we must
support the mechanisms for creating them and using them. And
I believe that we will need such mechanisms even if we only had
"scientific" concepts in the ontology -- because scientists
change their opinions about fundamental issues much more often
than "the man on the Clapham omnibus."
John Sowa
_______________________________________________________________
JF>... an SUO framework should allow the following to be represented:
>
>"the sun goes round the earth" (man on the Clapham omnibus)
>"the earth goes round the sun" (popular science)
>"the movement of the earth is determined by the gravitational attraction of
other bodies, particular massive bodies within the solar system ..." (high school
science)
>...
>continuing to
>...
>(full exposition of gravitational theory as applied to celestial bodies)
>
>as long as these are not treated as contextually equivalent assertions/theories
(which they would if the ontologies in which each statement occurs were to be
"mushed together"). Further, the framework should allow the bases for each
of these assertions to be formalized as well as the relationships among them.