Re: SUO: Collections - Aggregation or Set
Adam --
I take your suggestion under advisement, and have been thinking about it
since your note. I have not trained myself to think in KIF, but at some
point this is certainly possible, since for part of my life thinking in 5th
normal form data structures became quite natural for me. I am also,
however, thinking about some postings from John Sowa to the effect that a
lot of discussion about concepts should happen before attempting to commit
them to the formalism. I voted in favor of accepting Ian Niles's document
as a starting point, but did not mean by my vote that we should use changes
to that document as the main mechanism for moving forward.
As an interim step, I think I will record here a number of terms from the
International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics, Charles Francois,
ed. The definitions of these terms constitute 14 pages of very small
print, and could form an interesting exercise in formalization. So this
mere list is a *very* small interim step:
System
System (Abstract)
System (Adaptive)
System (Allopoietic)
System (Almost isolated)
System (Anticipatory)
System (Autonomous)
System (Behavior)
System (Closed)
System (Colonial)
System (Co-)
System (Complex)
System (Composite)
System (Conceptual or formal)
System (Concrete)
System (Connectionist)
System (Conscious)
System (Conservative, or Hamiltonian, or non-dissipative)
System (Controlled)
System (Cybernetic)
System (Decomposable)
System (Description)
System (Deterministic)
System (Dissipative)
System (Dynamic)
System (Equifinal)
System (Ergodic)
System (Exosomatic)
System (Far-from-equilibrium)
System (Formal)
System (Generative)
System (Heuristic)
System (Hierarchic)
System (Homeostatic)
System (Hypothesis of the lone)
System (Ideal-seeking)
System (Irreversible)
System (Isolated)
System (Isomorphic)
System (Life cycle of a)
System (Linear)
System (Man-machine)
System (Meta-) Transition
System (Multi-level)
System (Multistable)
System (Near equilibrium)
System (Nearly decomposable)
System (Nondeterministic)
System (Nonequilibrium)
System (Nonlinear)
System (Open)
System (Organismic)
System (Oscillating)
System (Polystable)
System (Probabilistic)
System (Purposeful)
System (Purpose seeking)
System (Purposive)
System (Quasi-periodic)
System (Richly or poorly joined)
System (Second order)
System (Self-energizing)
System (Self-modifying)
System (Self-organizing)
System (Self-referential)
System (Self-reproducing)
System (Source)
System (Stable)
System (State-determined)
System (State-maintaining)
System (State-transition)
System (Static)
System (Stationary)
System (Steady state)
System (Structure)
System (Symbolic)
System (Teleogenic)
System (Ultrastable)
System (Viable)
System (World)
Systems (Basic classes of)
Systems (Isomorphic)
Systems (Joined, or coupled dynamic)
Doug McDavid
Certified Executive Consultant
Voice of the Practitioner Initiatives
Professional Development - BIS, Americas
Member of IBM Academy of Technology
mcdavid@us.ibm.com -- 916-549-4600
Adam Pease <apease@ks.teknowledge.com> on 02/13/2001 01:34:59 PM
To: Douglas McDavid/Boulder/IBM@IBMUS,
standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org
cc:
Subject: Re: SUO: Collections - Aggregation or Set
Doug,
I think it would be both relevant and valuable to have someone create an
ontology of teams and groups, hopefully consistent with the ontology that
has been produced so far. It would be interesting to see how this would
fit into the mereological axioms Ian has integrated into the merged
ontology.
Adam
At 04:22 PM 2/12/2001 -0700, Douglas McDavid wrote:
>This thread is one of several where I could make this point, but I like
the
>example of the team.
>
>It seems to me from an ontological perspective it is very interesting to
>talk about the nature of teams, the various kinds of teams that we know of
>(professional, university, informal children's teams chosen on a
>playground, etc.), how the various kinds of teams differ from one another,
>and how they each differ from other forms of human social systems.
>Additionally, how human social systems differ from other natural social
>systems (ant colonies, schools of fish, cooperating beavers, etc.), and
how
>living social systems differ and are similar to other living systems, such
>as organisms (humans, whales, worms), systemic parts of organisms
>(cardiovascular systems, digestive systems etc.), cells, robots, cars,
>telecommunication networks, the whirlpool in my bathtub and the Great Red
>Spot of Jupiter. In other words ontological consideration of systems,
>whether autopoietic or not, complex and adaptive or not, dissipative
>structures or not, legally constituted or not, and any of many interesting
>dimensions of this subject.
>
>Is it too soon to start carving up the work of the SUO along these lines?
>Or is this ever going to be the focus of this work? At some level it is
>probably important to have exhaustive discussions of how set theory and
4-d
>vs. 3-d+time would accommodate meaningful classifications. It certainly
>must be interesting, since we keep gravitating back to these discussions.
>
>I could have easily jumped into the long discussion of relationships vs.
>relations. What I would have said there is that there is that while the
>various technical meanings of these terms is interesting, it should be
>equally interesting, from an ontological point of view, that there are
>large numbers of interesting types of relationships (contractual,
proximity
>emotional, linguistic, assembly, etc., etc.) Isn't this what we're about
>in this work? Or is it still just too early to start?
>
>