ONT Re: Data Models, Ontologies, Logic

[Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>]

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Note 22

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It may not seem too exciting, data model wise, but the Family Interaction
example is totally typical of every research data base that I've ever seen,
whether they had two variables and could be dispatched in a whiz on a quiz,
or whether they were long-term longitudinal studies with 100,000 variables
for which it took me a year just to make a dent in writing the concordance
and the indexing programs.  Underneath it all such a data base is nothing
but a list of variables with a rectangular array of values for variables,
each row of which constitutes an empirical data point.  Indeed, in most
research settings of any significance, a raw or rudimentary data base
like that bears a legal status that is not borne by any of its later
derivatives, and is required to be preserved in perpetuity against
any challenge to the integrity of its collection and analysis.

If you operate in an area where the "entities" and "relationships"
have been stable for a fairly long time, then you may have the
luxury of thinking of them in that order, and of maintaining
a more complicated data model.  But any such level of extra
organization is always abductive and hypothetical, as was,
in its way, the "bottom" level, and the fictive character
of every data model must constantly be justified against
every level of its contingent constitution.  I realize
that some ontologists have trouble with this notion,
that all of the extant "entities" were not created
by their own divine fiat at the beginning of time,
and thus can be imposed on the data by the very
same fiat, but in applications as diverse as
physics and medicine, the folks who attend
the birth of the knowledge know that the
concept of, say, a physical entity or
a disease entity, is something that
arises out of the relationships,
near the end of a long inquiry,
and not the other ways around.

And the folks who maintain the data bases for our more or less
well-working-worldviews know from sadder but wiser experience
that all of that extra structure is always in flux, and can
blow away at a moment's notice, and they know what a pain
it can be to try and restructure a top-heavy entrenchment
of overly ossified ideas.

Jon Awbrey

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