Re: lattice of ontology
Azmat,
I think most people have come to some conclusion like that:
> Maybe because we all are becoming accustomed to the thinking
> that the SUO is a pipe dream and better to leave behind the
> listing and all associated with it.
When this group was founded in 2000, most of us had some hope
that something useful could be accomplished, and I think we
have learned a lot. Following are my conclusions:
1. Everybody who develops an upper ontology has very different
and inconsistent axioms at the topmost levels.
2. Those inconsistences at the top make it impossible to share
anything at the lower levels with any other ontology whose
lower levels depend on assumptions made at the top.
3. Yet people have been communicating successfully for
thousands of years with very few abstract assumptions
about top-level entities, such as time, place, object,
process, etc.
4. Database systems have been interoperating successfully for
about 40 years with very few axioms or assumptions about
the top levels.
5. The most successful sharing in *all* fields -- science,
engineering, medicine, business, etc. -- has been based on
*terminology* at lower levels with very few, if any axioms
about the upper levels.
6. On the other hand, we do need axioms (and programs, which
are essentially compiled axioms) in order to do any kind of
detailed reasoning, computation, and problem solving.
7. Therefore, we should make a clear distinction between the
vocabularies or terminologies, which have very few axioms,
and the problem-oriented reasoning and computational
systems. For general purposes, sharing should be based on
the terminology. For reasoning and computation, the axioms
should be introduced at the lower problem-oriented levels.
In short, the hope of finding a commpon set of axioms at the
upper levels is *DOOMED*. The SUO work over the past five years
has been interesting, and we all learned a lot. But the most
important thing we leared is that assuming a fixed and frozen
set of upper level axioms does not promote interoperability.
Instead, the axioms introduce irrelevant contradictions that
are a major barrier to communication and sharing.
John Sowa