[SCL] "ontologies"

[Murray Altheim]

Gentlemen,

Since I'm probably considered among the total idiotic standards-wonk
boneheads who doesn't know my A from my elbow (since I likely know a
lot less than the list of individuals you provided, or at least this
would be believed by most of those individuals, and those here at
KMi, who hold them in high esteem to my knowledge), could you describe
for me something, or react to the language I'm using, to help me
understand what you're describing better. Maybe this will help you too,
at least to understand what somebody like me thinks. (I'm the majority,
you're the minority, so even if you're right and I'm wrong, you might
be interested in what I think. And help me think better.)

I have a set of documents that are expressed in Linear Topic Map
(LTM) notation. They gets parsed into my system and can be used for
their intended purposes in organizing information. Any of them can
be reserialized into XML Topic Map (XTM) notation, and it's certainly
possible to write a serializer to create an OWL or KIF or CGIF
document from them, or whatever. All this suits my purposes just fine;
I can do various sorts of inferencing (such as across transitive
relationships, slot-based reasoning, and I'm just beginning to work
on datatyping, measurement units and mereological relations). To
anyone in the W3C or here at KMi, either the individual documents or
the set of them taken as a whole would be called an "ontology". As a
whole, it'd be a fairly big document, depending on serialization, but
of the order of many megabytes.

Now, those individual documents, or even the large document as a
whole, could be considered a "set of sentences". They define terms
that I use (as Topics in the Topic Map sense) and relations between
them (as Associations in the Topic Map sense). I have the ability to
express context at a number of levels. A fragment from one of these
documents is shown below (in LTM notation):

   /* things that exist in space ....................................  */

   [SpatialThing ; Thing = "Spatial Thing"
     @"http://purl.org/ceryle/authoring/#SpatialThing"]
   {SpatialThing, Description, "Things that exist in space, having a
   physical presence and location (even if in constant motion)."}

   /* things that exist in time .....................................  */

   [TemporalThing ; Thing = "Temporal Thing"
     @"http://purl.org/ceryle/authoring/#TemporalThing"]
   {TemporalThing, Description, "Things that exist in time, such as events or actions."}

   [Object ; SpatialThing ; TemporalThing = "Object"
     @"http://purl.org/ceryle/authoring/#Object"]
   {Object, Description, "A thing manifesting a physical existence
   in the world, i.e., a physical object such as a person, a rock,
   a grain of sand, or even the air. Objects exist in both time and
   space. The physical existence of Things like spirits or demons is
   not addressed by this ontology."}

Now, to use the parlance now prevalent here lately, I don't give a
rat's ass about the correctness of the above content. But would it
be correct to consider them (and by extension, the larger document
they are extracted from) as a "set of sentences"?  Would an individual
"statement" (e.g., the one being made about SpatialThing as being
a subclass of Thing, having a name "Spatial Thing", a canonical
identifier of "http://purl.org/ceryle/authoring/#SpatialThing", and
the given description) be considered as a "theory" or an "ontology"?

I'm happy just calling it a statement or a sentence, which is what
it's to me closest to grammatically. I'm also happy considering that
the information in my document about "Spatial Thing" might be thought
of as my "theory" of the concept. I'm not happy with the idea that
this small subset of my document might be called an "ontology", since
I think of that as a larger thing.

Now, I've already broken my entire authoring ontology (which currently
consists of about a dozen smaller documents or sub-ontologies) into
"modules". The entire package I think of as an ontology, and I think
of the modules as *perhaps* ontologies in their own right, e.g., the
one on characters (i.e., fictional characters) is what I "know" about
characters. They are all still "sets of sentences". I'd prefer we
(or since I seriously doubt my opinion matters here much, you) use
"theory" for small things and "ontology" for big things, with some
notable threshold making them distinct.

Now, if all of this just confirms me as a total idiotic standards-wonk
boneheads who doesn't know my A from my elbow, I'll just crawl back
into my total idiotic standards-wonk boneheads who doesn't know my A
from my elbow hole and go back to work on making something actually
work, regardless of its correctness in either terminology or ontology,
and leave you guys to continue to thrash this about for the next year
or so.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

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