SUO: Sowa's Ontology
While the debate over what status to give the Merged Ontology file rages on, I'd like to ask John Sowa (and anyone else who understands this) about some things that have been puzzling me in Sowa's upper ontology.
Sowa (in his KR book, page 61) gives Person as an example of Firstness and Mother as an example of Secondness. So if a particular person (Mary Doe) is a mother, it seems that she falls into both categories of Firstness and Secondness, but she can't, since Firstness and Secondness (by definition) can have no members in common. This leads me to conclude that Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness are meta-classes, not classes of individuals. Firstness has the class Person as one of its members, and Secondness has the class Mother as one of its members -- is this correct? Mary Doe is a member of both Person and Mother, but not a member of Firstness or Secondness, because those can only have classes as members -- is this correct?
But if this is so, then why does Sowa's upper ontology put these meta-classes in the same lattice (intersecting with) classes of individuals such as Physical, Abstract, Continuant, and Occurrent? Is this a mistake, or how am I to understand this lattice? Is it possible that Sowa intends Physical, Abstract, Continuant, and Occurrent to be meta-classes too, so that his entire ontology is a classification of types, not of individuals? But his examples of members of these last four classes sound like they are intended to contain individuals, not classes/types.
The other main question I have is: where is the distinction between individuals and classes? This distinction is central to Cyc's upper ontology, yet I don't see this distinction anywhere in Sowa's upper ontology, which is why I'm confused about whether his ontology is classifying individuals or types.
I look forward to getting this confusion straightened out in my mind.
Thanks,
John A. Thompson
The Boeing Company