[SCL] Re: ontologies

[Jon Awbrey]

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murray,

could you explain this more simply to me?
i begin to detect in the surroundings an
old mare's nest about "asserted" versus
merely "contemplated" sentences, but
i can't quite see where the knot
is being tied this time.

gratiass,

jon

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Murray Altheim wrote:
> 
> 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               .
> 
>    The New Zealand Herald : Latest World News
> 
>       Kitten survives street sweeper
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> 
>    [must be an important kitten]

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http://www.cs.bsu.edu/homepages/mighty/history.html
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