RE: SUO: RE: CYC event vs. SUMO Process -- really different?
Pat,
The hypothetical Mary's birthday example raises another point about possible
things.
I cam across this point recently in Prior's Papers on time and tense, 2003]
p.87 and noted it down - " 'The (merely) possible', as Pierce said, 'is
necessarily general', and 'it is only actuality, the force of existence,
which bursts the fluidity of the general and produces a discrete unit. [Note
9: C.S. Pierce, Collected Papers, 4, 172. Cf my Time and Modality, p.114.]"
As Prior and Pierce suggest, hypothetical things, such as Mary's Birthday
party can have a range of actualisations. This, of course, depends upon the
context. In the case where Bob is a party organiser who has access to a
range of party venues, there are a range of possible locations.
This raises for me the question about the motivation for the necessity of
the different types of relations. Wouldn't you agree that any attempt to
synthesise these candidate 'ontologies' merely by examination of the axioms
without an understanding of their motivation (or whether they are aware of
or address the relevant issues) is a thankless task?
I know from many discussions with Nicola that these kinds of concern are
part and parcel of his work in trying to build an ontology. Not being
particularly familiar with SUMO or CYC, I wonder whether it is possible to
divine their motivations from the available documentation for dealing with
the hypothetical Mary's birthday example. Maybe a SUMO or CYC person could
comment.
Regards,
Chris
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org
[mailto:owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org]On Behalf Of
Patrick Cassidy
Sent: 13 June 2003 18:07
Cc: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
Subject: Re: SUO: RE: CYC event vs. SUMO Process -- really different?
> >
>
> Not having learned the complexities of OpenCyc or SUMO, it
> seems bad design to either
>
> 1. Require events to occur at locations (in regions) because
> there are events that are not spatial at all, e.g.,
> "what if Bob thought about Mary's birthday party?"
> is a hypothetical, with no spatial relationships at all.
> It shouldn't be necessary to represent this in any
> spatial way.
>
I'm not sure which event you are referring to, the
Bob thinking event or the Mary's Birthday party event,
but both of those (if they occurred) would have a spatial
location. With the data in the sentence, the spatial
location is not known. It is the rule rather than the
exception that some necessary relations or properties of
things mentioned in text (especially future events and more
especially in sentences taken out of context) are not known
from the text and their values in the representation of the
text must be left empty, or filled with a default if the
programmer chooses that tactic (e.g. Earth's Surface).
The fact that the events are hypothetical would need to be
represented, perhaps by a wrapper around the sentence within
the "if" clause, but the representation of hypotheticals
is a different topic. To say that an event marked as
hypothetical cannot have a location is like saying that
"Bob thought about mary's birthday party" cannot
be a sentence because it is enclosed within another
sentence. Both logic and language can encapsulate
structures within larger structures.
> or
>
> 2. Make the mathematics of temporal logic unavailable to
> any class of events, whether spatial or nonspatial in
> description.
>
I don't know what point you are making here. The
temporal location of events is point 3.4 of my suggestion,
and temporal location is in both Cyc and SUMO. What,
more specifically, is the problem you see?
Pat
=============================================
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc. || (908) 561-3416
735 Belvidere Ave. || (908) 668-5252 (if no answer)
Plainfield, NJ 07062-2054 || (908) 668-5904 (fax)
internet: cassidy@micra.com
=============================================