RE: SUO: RE: Re: Missing Ingredients
Pierluigi Miraglia wrote
> On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 02:22:00PM -0700, Richard Cooper wrote:
> > Jon Awbrey wrote:
> > <snip\>
> > > TJ: 1.1. Our goal, I take it, is to increase the semantic
> > > interoperability
> > > of databases. This means, I take it, (although I
> > > have found no
> > > description of any such thing on the SUO website)
> > > is to create
> > > a registration framework for real world databases.
> > >
> > > Tom,
> > >
> > > There's about 20 years worth of research on "deductive databases"
> > > that I can remember just since the first standard textbooks began
> > > to appear. But you said bottoms-up, and I'm all for that, well,
> > > let me check -- yes, it's an odd-numbered day where I am, so OK.
> > >
> > > Let us try to approach the question
> > > of "semantic inter-operability" (SIO)
> > > by way of the following sub-questions:
> > >
> > > 1. What is the "meaning" of a "set of sentences" (SOS)?
> > >
> > > 2. What is the "meaning" of a "table of tuples" (TOT)?
> > >
> > > 3. How shall we compare the "meanings" of these two?
> > >
> > > I will give you and me both time to think and then get
> back to you.
> > >
> > > Jon Awbrey
> >
> > This set of three questions is the most important triple we're
> > dealing with in all SUO work. Getting clear answers to how
> > meaning is represented, communicated, stored, compared and
> > organized would be a successful result.
>
> could you try to expand a bit on this? For instance, how does a table
> of tuples compare to a set of sentences?
There are two different ways in which they are related.
English sentences have traditionally been represented as
FOL statements when modeling their semantics. FOL statements
can be represented as tuples in a database. So to understand
natural language utterances, programs translate the statements
into those forms. For example, WordNet has a set of 19 tables
to represent all ontological information.
Secondly, when naming tables, columns and domains, programmers
normally try to assign meaningful names to each of these. If
we intend to communicate meaning among ourselves and to future
others, we should use words that have meanings as close as
possible to the natural language words people use in communications.
Thus the concepts, properties, class structures and other
lexical relationships that WordNet documents should be a good
starting point to define the words of our SUO ontology.
> >
> > We have predefined the answer to be an ontology. Then we refined
> > that concept to include the lattice of ontologies, plus the IFF
> > framework, but I still get the feeling there's a lot of stuff left
> > out.
>
> (No here I disagree: once you have answered every question about
> meaning the work would be done.)
I don't think we will every answer every question. Here I am
indicating that this group evolved its understanding of our
requirements from a simple ontology to the lattice, to add the
IFF and a registry. Yet we still don't have any specific
results, and these concepts don't seem complete to me yet.
> >
> > So I agree with Tom that the focus should be refined further
> > to incorporate real world database concepts, and I add one more
> > suggestion; that we should be working with natural language
> > words and sentences to impose the type structure, or class
> > structure, and property lists, of common everyday concepts like
> > address, customer, person, ..., fill in your favorite concepts.
>
> what is the alternative to "real world database concepts"? What
> sort of choice are we presented with?
Several emails have mentioned the need to involve the true
drivers of our economy - commercial interests - in the movement
toward a semantic capability. The way to do that is to appeal
to commercially useful concepts, attributes, axioms, and other
mechanisms for representing commercially useful databases.
> > Finally, since we haven't been able to agree on more enhanced
> > ontologies than WordNet, perhaps we should start the bottom-up
> > process by extracting exactly the ontology that WordNet provides.
> > This could be one of the bottom-level concept sets, along with
> > others that may appear in the lattice as we continue.
> >
> > Rich
> >
>
> --
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> Pierluigi Miraglia Cycorp, Inc.
> Ontologist 3721 Executive Center Dr.
> (512) 514-2988 Austin, TX 78731
>
>
JMHO,
Rich