SUO: an ontology of relations in RDF/OWL and SUO

["asha" <abdoul@cytanet.com.cy>]

To All concerned,

My recent message as to the ontological status of relations and how (poorly) they are described (in RDF/OWL) caused positive undersanding in the SUO community. In order that not to reduce so significant theme to the narow topic how some sorts of relations must be formatted or automated, now hotly  discussed between Adam Pease and Philip Martin, I communicate the explanation; although, recognizing that the question what and how something can be automated is a fundamental issue behind all computing.

May I point out the essence of my message in a more specific way: relations are fundamental to any robust knowledge modeling system, since what the system knows about the class of relations and how it models this elusive kind of entity come to be the crucial indicants of its quality and commercial usage. It is only sad that the extant literature on the ontology of relations is poor comparing with the formal calculi (algebra and logic) of relations, which is mostly due to the pioneering works of De Morgan and Peirce; as far as we know, there is no systematic and formal classification of the fundamental species of relations, not mentioning Kant's and Hume's taxonomies. Inspite of this, the reason to have a fundamental theory of relations is perfectly clear, for not having developed such a theory may result in a variety of schemes mostly based on practical purposes or everyday intuition, as systems like RDF/OWL and UML, avoiding, or rather unable, to define and classify relations and consider them as the class of things having distinct existence.  

If briefly and ignoring the detais, just the marrow and meat, creating the EIS ontology as a Universal Formal Ontology (UFO), we found out that the universal class of relations consists of sixteen classes of ordered classes of the world variables (objects O, states S, changes C, and relations R) arrayed in a matrix structure:

O : O	O : S	O : C	O : R
S : O	S : S	S : C	S : R
C : O	C : S	C : C	C : R
R : O	R : S	R : C	R : R

Now, depending on the nature of correlatives, the general relational formula allows for (or generate) a complete extent of possible relations, like those so richly listed but not properly ordered in the WordNet' lexical database (sorry for the long list):

=> social relation (communication (message, language, spoken and written, infection or contagion,), relations or dealings, professional relation, politics, interpersonal chemistry or alchemy) 
=> position, spatial relation (inclination, slope, placement, point of view, coincidence, centrality, marginality, anteriority, posteriority, outwardness, inwardness, malposition, northerness, southerness, horizontality, verticality, way, direction, angular position)
=> ownership (community, severality, property right, proprietorship, employee ownership, landholding, stockholding)   
=> causality 
=> relationship, human relationship (personal relation: bonding, obligation)

=> function 

=> association (colligation: generalization, induction)

=> logical relation (contradictory, contrary, transitivity, reflexivity, modality or mode, implication or conditional relation)

=> mathematical relation (function (inverse, Kronecker delta, metric, transformation, mapping, map, or correspondence, operator, trigonometric, threshold, exponential), parity, transitivity, reflexivity)

=> foundation (footing, basis, or ground; grass roots) 
=> connection, connexion, connectedness (series, bond, linkage, communication, concatenation, bridge,     involvement, iclusion or containment, relevance (materiality, cogency, point, reference, regard, respect, relation to, applicability), relatedness (bearing))

=> unconnectedness (irrelevancy, unrelatedness) 
=> linguistic relation (grammatical relation, agreement, transitivity, intransitivity, coreference, conjunction, complementation, coordination, subordination, modification, mood, anaphoric relation, voice, inflection, aspect; semantic relation, subordination or hyponymy, superordination or hypernymy, synonymy, antonymy, whole to part relation or holonymy, part to whole relation or meronymy, troponymy)  
=> part, portion, component part, component (linguistic or language unit; item or point; basis or base; detail, particular, or item; unit; member; substance; remainder, balance, residual, residuum, or rest; subpart)

=> affinity, kinship (rapport; sympathy)

=> kinship, family relationship, relationship (affinity or phylogenetic relation; descent, line, lineage, or filiation; affinity or kinship by marriage; consanguinity or blood kinship; parentage or birth; fatherhood or paternity; motherhood or maternity; brotherhood; sisterhood; marital relationship) ,  
=> magnitude relation, quantitative relation (scale; ratio (profit margin, abundance, efficiency, frequency, productivity, quotient; rate (acceleration, fertility, mortality, flow rate, flux, frequency, growth rate, speed)  
=> control  
=> business relation (competition; clientage)   
=> reciprocality, reciprocity (complementarity, correlation, mutuality or interdependence (commensalism, parasitism, symbiosis, sharing), mutualness, reciprocal)    
=> interrelation,interrelationship, interrelatedness   
=> temporal relation (antecedent, chronology, synchronism, asynchronism)  
=> comparison (imaginative comparison: simile, metaphor, allegory) 
=> opposition, oppositeness (antipode, antithesis, conflict, contrast, mutual opposition or polarity, ungradable opposition, conradictoriness, contradiction, contrary, contrariety, tertium quid, reverse, inverse, antagonism)

=> change (difference, gradient)  
As we can see, the mathematical (logical) relations between sets (classes) so actively used by OWL make only small part of an enormous universe of relations (real, ideal, and formal or external and internal). Here emerges the conclusion that 'proposing a general conceptual scheme by using the class /property distinction, the data type languages like OWL are missing the meat of things', accordinly, using such a language is harmful with  badly constructed Web-based applications. It looks the SUO should also avoid such a serious confusion.

Azamat Abdoullaev

Director and Chief Scientist

EIS Encyclopedic Intelligent Systems LTD

http://www.eis.com.cy