SUO: Re: W3C approves RDF and OWL as recommendations
To: John Sowa
Thank you for your explicative comments and inciting suggestion. Please find
below some commentaries.
Azamat Abdoullaev
Director and Chief Scientist
EIS Encyclopedic Intelligent Systems LTD
Russia, Moscow
Cyprus, Pafos
http://www.eis.com.cy
----- Original Message -----
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>
To: "asha" <abdoul@cytanet.com.cy>; <danny666@virgilio.it>
Cc: <standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>; <cg@cs.uah.edu>
Sent: Sunday, February 15, 2004 9:54 PM
Subject: Re: W3C approves RDF and OWL as recommendations
> The recent interchange between Azamat Abdoullaev and
> Danny Ayers raises some important questions about
> logic and ontology in general and about the SUO and
> the semantic web in particular. I don't agree 100%
> with either one, but I agree more with Asha (about 75%)
> than with Danny (about 25%). In any case, the questions
> address important issues about the goals and directions
> for both the SUO and the semantic web.
>
>
> I agree with Azamat Abdoullaev's statement:
>
> AA> the administrators running the World Wide Web Consortium
> > rushed the matter by recommending OWL as an ontology
> > language standard fit for structuring the Web data,
> > documents, and applications. Since, beside the well-known
> > merits, the language has bad conceptual faults which make
> > it fall short of wide commercial use.
>
> But there is much more to the concept of causality than
> just a simple relation. For a brief outline of some
> of the issues, I suggest a paper I started to write,
> and which I hope to complete sometime:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/causal.htm
> Processes and Causality
>
> I agree with Abdoullaev that Aristotle's framework is an
> outstanding example of the kind of work that is needed
> for an upper ontology, and I believe that the Aristotelian
> foundation he recommends should be included in the MSO
> (Multi-Source Ontology) that is being proposed for the SUO:
>
> http://www.eis.com.cy/
>
I confirm your statement that the SUO to make a break-through advancement
really needs such a fundamental entity type system as a unifying knowledge
structure. I consider being honoured to cooperate with the SUO WG, to
advance the progress of your grandiouse undertaking, both from scientific
and technological viewpoints .
> Where we disagree is whether OWL is a satisfactory example
> of what we know. The Aristotelian basis of the EIS ontology
> has been known for over two millennia.
It seems we succeeded in rendering Aristotle's Logic, Ontology and Physics
formally, in the language of mathematics and computer science, embedding an
ontological theory of relations into his grand knowledge and reasoning
system. Due to such approach, such a universal formal ontology (UFO) can be
useful to putting together as essential components of a whole system both
the upper content ontologies (WordNet, SUMO, CYC, DOLCE, EDR,
EuroWordNetWord) and the formal ontology languages (OWL and OWL Rule).With
this connection it should be mentioned that the OWL Web Ontology Language
pretending to take the first ontological prize mostly because it is actually
rooted in Topics, Book 1 of 11 pages, where, as you know, it was first
developed the formal language of definitions, classes, properties
and semantic rules of reasoning about them, that are embodied in Web data,
documents and applications. Although, there are bad faults, which the
language starts feeling in OWL-S, it is missing the upper ontology
predicates within which the class and property and definition always must
be.
FOL has been known
> for over a century, and the SQL application of FOL has been
> in commercial use for the past 30 years. Another example is
> the Horn-clause subset of logic, which has been implemented
> in many commercial applications for almost as long as SQL.
>
> Although I agree that the possibility of a single universal
> ontology is "a moot point", there is a lot more that can be
> done to accommodate multiple ontologies. I have recommended
> the following paper as an outline of a richer, broader approach,
> which could be supported by something like the MSO and WebKB:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.htm
> Signs, Processes, and Language Games
>
> John Sowa
>
My best regards,
Azamat