SUO: RE: RE: Re: Missing Ingredients
Rich:
1. To use WordNet to implement what I have in mind would require database
tables for every leaf-node concept in WordNet.
2. It would also require a database schema for every concept in WordNet,
leaf-node or not.
3. Then SQL queries could reference any of these schemas, specifying result
sets.
4. All tables registered under the referenced nodes would be in-scope; all
others not.
5. The semantics of the result set would be as clear as the definitions of
the referenced nodes, and not any clearer.
Theoretical issues abound, of course. And certainly many more than I am
aware of. For example:
re 1: dictionaries are notoriously not hierarchies, and are notoriously
circular. So perhaps we would need a hierarchical distillate of WordNet, not
WordNet itself.
re 2: are all non-leaf nodes instantiated only through their leaf-node
subtypes?
re 3 & 4: so SQL queries, at least those referencing more than one database,
would be redirected to reference the registration hierarchy, and
supplemented to optionally specify an include-database and/or
exclude-database list for all databases whose tables are registered under
the referenced node. There's a fair chunk of software development work here,
and its hard, internals-type middleware work, not traditional applications
development work.
re 5: my experience has been that the relevant semantics of business
database tables nearly always requires distinctions not part of the
definition of the ordinary language terms used to label tables (or columns).
So even if all this could be done starting with WordNet, we still wouldn't
have anything a CFO would pull out his checkbook for.
Finally, your comments about sets not being mutually exclusive, and the
messiness of databases, are well taken. My emails in which I discussed
Wittgensteinian family resemblances, a couple of months ago, were attempts
to talk about this messiness. But I'd rather stop talking philosophy,
translating back and forth between Peirce, Wittgenstein, Quine and even the
dreaded Rorty. I'd rather stop talking about axiomatizing everything we do.
I'd rather start building a house on a local sandbar instead of endlessly
prospecting for granite bedrock (to use the least favorable metaphor I can
think of for what I am recommending). (After all, Stone Mountain, the
largest outcrop of granite in the world, is only a few miles from me and my
local creek! i.e. various metaphors about firm foundations are creating
"analysis paralysis", IMHO.)
But so what? Is there an idea here that might lead somewhere? Or have I just
rediscovered, in less refined language, some of the more obvious
implications of knowledge soup, KIF, a lattice of theories, IFF, C. S.
Peirce, twenty years of work in deductive databases, or two ISO documents
recently mentioned by Matthew West? I certainly don't know.
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Cooper [mailto:rich@valutech.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 12:22 PM
To: Tom Johnston; Jon Awbrey; SUO
Subject: RE: RE: Re: Missing Ingredients
From: Tom Johnston wrote:
> That's interesting. I've been thinking of a do-it-yourself,
> start-from-scratch approach.
>
> One question: are the entries in WordNet sophisticated enough
> to make the
> kind of distinctions I've been providing examples of,
> distinctions where
> tables in different databases but with the same names (the
> Customer table,
> the Shipments table, etc.) nonetheless have significantly
> different set
> membership criteria?
WordNet provides class structure, so the concept of a
customer is returned from their standard seach as below:
"
The noun customer has 1 sense (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (25) customer, client -- (someone who pays for goods or services)
"
The distinctions you mentioned were specific predicates that
distinguish the class of customers into those who pay upon
purchase, those who pay upon shipment, and those who pay
a bill when its due. Those kinds of distinctions are deeper
than "customer", but still based on predications using the
same English words you used in describing the subsets.
But you could take that arbitrarily deep. For example,
some customers could pay upon purchase for some items, pay
upon shipment for others, and pay by mail for yet others.
So the sets aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Since
you've dealt with databases, you know how things can get
muddled up by unanticipated real world conditions.
Given the columns of your customer table, you could make
all kinds of distinctions, such as customers from Chicago,
customers over 65, and so on. All of these distinctions
have to be communicated to your users, and your users
work in natural language, so you must also.
So I think WordNet provides a good starting point, and its
an authoritative reference work that lots of people use,
with ongoing funding and good prospects for continued
refinement. And its free. So it makes a very good starting
point.
JMHO,
Rich
> From a business perspective, that's
> where the rubber
> really meets the road. Clearing up stuff like that is what will get
> corporate checkbooks out. Formalizing ordinary language
> semantics will not.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Tom
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org
> [mailto:owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org]On Behalf Of
> Richard Cooper
> Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2003 5:22 PM
> To: Jon Awbrey; SUO
> Subject: SUO: RE: Re: Missing Ingredients
>
>
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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
>
> he
>