SUO: *Date 07 Feb 2002
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SUO WG Members, and Chair,
Item 1. Objection
Jim,
As a member of the SUO WG, I formally object to the persistent
and long continuing practice of the members who sign themselves
as "Ian Niles and Adam Pease, Teknowledge Corp." in their use of
the imprimatur of the "IEEE Standard Upper Ontology Working Group,
P1600.1" to advertise their "draft proposal", as instanced here:
http://ontology.teknowledge.com:8080/rsigma/FormalSUOdraft.rtf
As I understand it, the above document is a Teknowledge document, and has
no official status under the aegis of the IEEE P1600.1 SUO Working Group,
either as a Starter or as a Working document. Please correct me if I am
mistaken about this, as I do not recall having taken a vote on the issue.
I believe that the Teknowledge Team has had several warnings about
this pattern of practices. If it continues, I will be compelled by
the principles of "truth in acronymizing" to submit a formal request
that they change the name of their "Suggested Upper Merged Ontology"
to a name less likely to trade on the benefits of its confusion with
the work of the IEEE SUO WG, say, "Teknowledge Upper Merged Ontology".
Item 2. Recommendation
Jim,
I am willing to accept for the time being that you are acting
on principle with regard to the appeal of the SUMO vote, and
I can respect that. But the SUMO group continues to act like
the "protégés", that is to say, the "protectees" of the Chair,
immune from any criticism that they do not find it convenient
to answer, and I do not believe that this does the SUO effort,
nor even the SUMO interests, very much good in the longer run.
The vote, whatever the technical outcome, was a communication
to the SUMO group they have a clear and present problem with
the perceived quality of their proposal, and I think that it
would have been far better had they hired more philosophers
and programmers instead of all the money that they expended
on attorneys. Just my take on it. Nothing about that vote
was final, but it would be nice if they got the semantics.
I am trying to contribute what I know to the success of this work.
There are one or two areas, like combinatorics, where I have some
expertise, and at a level that you are not likely to get for free
again. I know how external critics in these areas will view some
of the stuff -- strike that -- guff that I have seen spewing from
the SUMO font. I have given them references to read and tried to
help them navigate that thicket, but their arrogant attitude that
they can just russell up whatever axioms and definitions may come
into their heads is the pattern of conduct that will eventually
doom their project, and not anything that I might have to say.
I feel entitled to add a personal note:
Due to the ongoing strategies and the relentless tactics of
this coalition of members to pre-empt the prerogatives that
the SUO Working Group has to decide its questions based on
sound philosophical, scientific, and technical principles,
with all due research and scholarship and testing, I feel
compelled to make this comment, that I have long regarded
it as an insult to the integrity and the intelligence of
this whole group and of every concentric community about
it that they continue to keep trying to pull this stuff.
Item 3. Animadversion
The SUMO group continues to bring us the spectacle of folks
who would define the essence of charity in giving when they
cannot even formalize correctly the varieties of things that
can be adequately formalized, oh, say, like a single abstract
k-adic relation, of which a 3-adic transaction of giving would
be one acute example.
Item 4. Incidental Musement on the Theme of Charitable Giving
http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03726.html
Item 5. Sanction Clauses
I continue to opine that the best policy for developing a sound
compatibility specification is to build a solid and substantial
appliance that is worth the candle of compliance, whereupon we
will all have a better idea about which features of ontological
theories are worth fixing as mandatory obligations and which of
their features are best left free to vary as flexible options.
The last time that the SUMO group led us all down this primrose path,
I believe that the Sense of the Whole from every other side was that
the lion's share of this whole pride of conformance closures was just
"not effectively verifiable" (my words), "unenforceable", inoperative,
not machine checkable, semi-undecidable, and so on, as I remember the
gist of it. In the Year 2002, I do not think that any of us should be
wasting our breaths and our brief lives on conformance predicates that
are not computable on the domain of explicit syntactic docs and txts.
In summary, it is my opinion that whatever energy we direct
along this conformal vector should be better spent thinking
about how we might provide an "operational definition" for
suitably compatible ontological theories, in no small part
because it would also force us to think about the pragmatic
meanings of the terms in our prospective reference ontology.
And this, I believe, would be a very health-giving exercise.
Item 6. In Spite Of All That
For the sake of extra clarity and also of conformity to
the conventions that I am used to following, I make the
following substitutions in the text that was submitted:
1. From "O" to "Q", understood as an "ontological theory".
2. From "T" to "t", understood as an "ontological term".
3. From "SUO" to "S", on behalf of the extra abstraction.
4. From "SUO-KIF" to "L", understood as a formal language.
5. "L(T)" for "the language used for ontological theory T".
Thus, L = L(S) = L(SUO) = SUO-KIF, if that should be the case.
Finally, most users of formal language theory that I know
use "formula" or "sentence" for "well-formed formula", as
there is very little interest in the other kind, and when
there is a need to call up an arbitrary string of letters,
the moniker "string" will usually wrap it up quite nicely.
Nota Bene. I worry about the use of the word "model" here,
adorned by "information" or otherwise, but perhaps the IFF
group can justify the risk of additional confusion that is
bound to arise by confounding models and theories. And no,
it is not the brand of scruple that will go away merely by
citing a transiently modern authority, eso- or exo- teric.
| Conformance
|
| Implementations of S (= SUO) are "ontologies" or "information models".
| A conforming implementation is an ontology or information model Q
| such that all three of the following rules are satisfied:
|
| 1. For every term t occurring in both Q and S,
| the axioms for t in Q must be exactly those
| axioms for t in S whose component terms t_j
| all occur in L(Q).
|
| 2. Every term t in Q is such that:
|
| a. t appears in S,
|
| OR
|
| b. t has axioms in Q,
|
| AND
|
| the axioms that t has in Q are sentences of L(S),
|
| OR
|
| when the axioms that t has in Q are translated from L(Q) to L(S)
| they become sentences of L(S) that contain only the most specific
| appropriate terms t_j that are axiomatized in S,
|
| OR
|
| c. t is axiomatized in [or?] using terms that have property 2b.
|
| 3. Q is internally consistent and it is consistent with S,
| that is, a contradiction cannot be derived by means of
| first-order logic from the set of statements belonging
| either to Q or S.
Anyway, that's how I read things at present.
Jon Awbrey
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