RE: SUO: RE: A proposed SUO content outline - roles
At 07-03-01 13:14 -0600, pat hayes wrote:
### Another useful
predicate could be "is_element_of_SUO(concept, context)"
### this would reduce a lot of issues to mundane implementation :-)
--Robert Meersman
Er, no...it wouldn't. This is an interesting point, close to the heart of
the ontology enterprise. If that really is a *predicate*, then things
called 'concept' and 'context' have to be presumed to exist (in the
logical sense of 'exist', ie to be in the domain of quantification.) So
you have put these things into the actual ontology, where they need to be
incorporated into the classification heirarchy, axioms have to be
provided to fix their meanings (and debates will then ensue about whether
the axioms have indeed captured the intended meanings or not, etc.),
their relationships with all the other things in the ontology (notions of
brotherhood, armchairs, shoes and ships and sealing wax, ...) need to be
spelled out, and so on. So this is NOT just a matter of mundane
implementation. Implementation is easy, compared to getting the ontology
right.
Pat Hayes
### Pat, to be clear: I was only trying to be ironic. I paraphrased an
adagium by Roger Shank, long ago, who claimed FOPL guys have it easy,
modelling human genetics, social dynamics and biochemistry as
"loves(John Mary)" :-)
### This said, your point is a deep and interesting one. And does it not
imply that a true Upper O'gy must be self-descriptive, for want otherwise
of a formal specification to give to our programmers to write
interpreters for it? Unless one knows of a logic that describes group
agreement process, including the handling of localized inconsistencies,
...
--Robert Meersman
Prof Dr Robert A Meersman VUB (Vrije
Universiteit Brussel)
Department of Computer Science STARlab --Building
F-G/10
Pleinlaan
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B-1050 Brussels Belgium
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