[SCL] Re: ontologies

[Jon Awbrey]

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JA: 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.

MA: Okay then.  I'll try to figure out what you meant.

MA: 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).

what i understand is that there is a type of sign called a "file of bits" (fob),
say x, that can be scanned in accord with various alternative conventions that
we may encompass under the generic name of "types", say t, u, v are 3 types.
the reading of x under type t is conventionally indicated as x : t.  but
let's be iconoclasts, on account of the circumstance that an asymmetric
relation is better represented by an asymmetric symbol, and write this
as "x <: t", reading it as "x under type t".  let us ignore for now
whether this is a virtual functor or enacts a transduction of code.

> That much I believe is fairly straightforward.  Just your typical,
> bread-and-butter conversions, serializations, etc. from one format
> to another, using the syntax and conventions described by the system.
> Jack Park has talked about hooking up Jena2 to Ceryle so he could play
> in the RDF world, etc.  This kind of thing has been going on for years.
> It was KIF a decade or more ago, nowadays it's RDF, OWL, Topic Maps, etc.
> Same pancake, different syrup.  Or something like that ...

so far so good ...

> 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.

a fob is still a fob, as time goes mega ...

> This?  I'm just stating that the sum of statements
> about a domain being made are called an "ontology".

i take it for granted that fobs are closed under
finite concatenations, if that is what you mean
by "sum of statements".

the interpretive marking "x <: ontology"
appears to bear some extra significance?

according to my established routine,
i would have to ask questions of the
following sort:

what do you mean by saying that fob x is
"about" or "made about" a given "domain"?

ok, i see a hard patch up ahead, actually several,
so i think that i will recover my strength while
awaiting your responses to what i've said and
asked so far.

jon

MA: 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."}

MA: Point here was that while the "ontology" might be 16MB, it's constructed of
    individual statements about terms and relations, as above, just as a novel
    may be 800 pages but it's still composed of sentences.

MA: 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"?

MA: Just asking the question I assumed to answer in my previous comment.

MA: 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"?

MA: So, is the statements you see above in LTM syntax about "SpatialThing",
    "TemporalThing" and "Object", are those statements (let's pretend there's
    about two dozen individual assertions there, because that's about how
    many there are) considered a "theory" or an "ontology"? Would the
    statements about solely "TemporalThing" be a "theory" or an "ontology"?
    I'd say that there are about three sentences, about 20-24 assertions
    made by those three sentences, that *if encapsulated as a grouping*,
    that would be a "theory", and taken as a whole, an "ontology". And
    the definition of "whole" would be modular, since modularity is not
    semantic but structural, i.e., you could have my authoring ontology
    in one document, seven documents, or seventy, and they'd when processed
    become the same thing. The question (to me) is whether you could
    consider any "set of sentences" an ontology. I think of a "theory" as
    something smaller than that, maybe some form of specific hypothesis
    about something in a domain, e.g., an assertion about the relationship
    between two terms.

MA: 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.

MA: I may sound like I'm contradicting myself, but I'm trying to state
    that "ontology" needs to be big enough to be assertions about a
    domain of terms and relations rather than a single term. The latter
    to me sounds more like a theory.

MA: 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.

MA: Just noting that modularity is structural, not (at least
    necessarily) semantic, though it could mirror the semantics.

MA: 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.

MA: This probably doesn't need interpretation unless one or two
    of the words I used were misunderstood.  Bonehead, perhaps?

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