SUO: RE: Lifecycle Integration Schema
Dear Jon,
See comments below.
Matthew West
Principal Consultant
Shell Information Technology International Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Other Tel: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.west@shell.com
Internet: http://www.shell.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawbrey@att.net]
> Sent: 02 September 2003 16:53
> To: West, Matthew R SITI-ITPSIE; SUO
> Subject: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
>
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> LIS. Discussion Note 7
>
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> LIS: | thing
> |
> | A <thing> is anything that is or may be thought about
> or perceived,
> | including material and non-material objects, ideas,
> and actions.
> |
> | Every <thing> is either
> | a <possible_individual>,
> | or an <abstract_object>.
> |
> | NOTE 1. Every <thing> is identifiable within a system.
> | System identifiers created by other systems and received
> | as part of a data exchange may be stored for future reference
> | as an identification, referring to the originating organisation
> | or system.
> |
> | NOTE 2. Every example provided for other entity data types
> | declared in this schema is also an example of <thing>.
> |
> |
> http://www.tc184-sc4.org/wg3ndocs/wg3n1328/lifecycle_integrati
> on_schema/lexical/thing.html
>
> JA: You are saying that you are really only thinking about things
> that have identifiers in given system, or names in a certain
> context of discussion. This is very significant and needs to
> be elevated to the level of an explicit principle, instead of
> being left implicit in a note that is likely to be neglected,
> in other words, relegated to a hidden axiom or constraint
> whose consequences are not critically reflected on.
>
> MW: I think it is more that we are saying that if you want to
> say something about an object under this standard, you have
> to be prepared to give that object an identifier. This is a
> practical rather than philosophical statement. You will find
> elsewhere under representation a quite general approach to
> identification. Providing this "system unique identifier"
> was more a piece of practical design. I.e. philosophically
> you can ignore it.
>
> JA: In formal computational terms, a "system unique identifier" (SUI)
> of a denoted object is known as a "gödel number" (gnumb). There
> are gnumbs for objects in the external world, whether abstract or
> concrete, and there are gnumbs for every finite piece of text in
> the formal language that we use, the latter gnumbs being what we
> are really creating when we "quote" that piece of text.
>
> JA: A measure of how "critically reflective" a formal system can be,
> or help us to be, about these external and internal worlds both,
> is determined by many pickwickian details of the gnumb function
> gnumb : X -> N, where N is the set of nonnegative integers, and
> X is typically thought of as being built up in layers from some
> initial X_0 that we might treat as the "initial external world".
>
> JA: From another angle, if we think of SUI's as "coordinates"
> of objects,
> that have their meanings relative to a particular frame
> of reference,
> but may be total gödellygeek from the POV of another
> reference frame,
> then what we have here is the task of intercommunication
> among codes
> that we have charged ourselves to discharge.
>
> JA: So there's a lot more to say about this,
> but the thrust of it all is that we can
> no longer just shove these issues aside,
> under whatever category label we assign.
>
> MW: Then I suggest you consider this attribute deleted for the
> purposes of the use of this material within this forum.
>
> Matthew,
>
> I don't understand what you are saying here.
>
> Perhaps you mean to delete Note 1, but that note is
> key to specifying in operational terms what you mean
> by identity, identification, individuals, and also a
> <thing> as "anything that is or may be thought about",
> since those thoughts do not enter into public discourse
> with being translated into signs of some kind. That is,
> the defining clause for <thing> cannot be separated from
> the issues of Note 1.
MW: What I mean is that there are two separate elements to the
data model. The first part is a model of "the world". For this
we do not need Note 1 or the ID attribute it refers to. We are
not saying that all objects of interest necessarily have an
identifier. We are instead saying something about how we will
manage informatoin about the objects, and that to be able to
refer to objects consistently within a system, we will give
them a system identifier (to add but no be confused with the
arbitrary number of other identifiers the object is allowed to
have through other parts of the model). This is what I would
call an engineering design decision, rather than an
ontological commitment.
MW: We could have chosen to require implementers to use the
general identification scheme for all identification purposes,
but the consequence would have been that queries would take
10-100 times longer to run.
>
> Jon Awbrey
>
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