SUO: Re: Effective Logical Formalism
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ELF. Discussion Note 4
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JA = Jon Awbrey
JS = Jim Schoening
Re: ELF Literature Page 4. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg11311.html
JS: Could you help me understand the relevance of these postings
to the work of this group. I would define this as "directly
relating to any of the three starter documents".
JS: Taking this posting as an example, I don't see any reference to
any of these documents. I don't see any recommended changes to
wording of any of the documents.
JS: Of course, any advance or consensus in ontology could be shown to be
relevant to these documents, but that's unfairly stretching the rule.
JS: That approach will never get us to a completed document.
Maybe no other approach will either, but that does not
justify turning this into a general ontology discussion
list.
JS: If you have a change you want to propose to a document, you
should explain it from the perspective of the document, and
you should propose specific wording changes. You can then
debate the merits and seek to build consensus. That's how
documents are advanced.
JS: So, taking this posting as an example,
please explain how this relates.
Jim,
Thanks for the question. I will attempt to explain the relevance of
this line of discussion to the extent that I currently understand it.
I believe that there are others who can speak to the finer details.
I think that all of the current starter groups have expressed their
intentions, perhaps at varying levels of commitment and enthusiasm,
to work within a prospectively more general ontological framework
that will be structured along the lines of IFF, including various
levels of modular structure such as might be reflected in a LOT,
and all of us in the SUO community have been anxiously awaiting
the return of the S/CL (Streamlined/Common Logic) subcommunity
to the fold of our ongoing discussions. I have been informed
that the LBase proposal of Guha and Hayes shows some promise
of a concrete relationship to the prospective S/CL formalism,
and this line of discussion was initiated in part to begin
reading through the latest version of the LBase document:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/NOTE-lbase-20031010/
This thread grew out of discussions that included several other
web oriented frameworks and languages, like OWL, RDF, Topic Maps,
and so I chose a more non-descript subject line in order to cover
the lot of them without special pleading, but for the moment I was
asked to focus on LBase.
I believe it is abundantly clear that our discussions here, for all
their need to remain exacting, specific, technical, competent in the
current research base on formal specification and modeling languages,
and informed by the current state of the art in the multiplicity of
fields of knowledge for which the SUO will need to embody axiomatic
bases, are not yet to the point of a final editing process, such as
would be feasible to carry out simply by proposing and debating one
or another typographical alteration to one of our current starter
documents. I honestly cannot see how anyone would imagine this
to be possible at the present stage of the game. If you have
some reason to believe that such a strategy would be feasible
or successful at our current state of development, I would
genuinely like to see some argument for it.
I hope this will go toward explaining the general relevence of
this line of discussion to the aims of the SUO working group.
If you have more specific concerns, I will try to clarify
its more specific components of relevance to our goals.
Jon Awbrey
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