SUO: Re: CYC Event vs. SUMO Process -- Tomorrow's Sea Battle in a Teacup
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Patrick Cassidy wrote:
>
> Jon Awbrey wrote:
>
> >
> > Patrick,
> >
> > The thing that will prevent any of these characterizations of event and process from
> > being taken seriously by any research community -- communities whose sense of common
> > sense is not defined by the maxim "if it's in a textbook it can't be common sense" --
> > much less viewed as 'the' standard, is that the segments of the SUO community that
> > generated these characterizations have not taken seriously any of the definitions
> > of event or process that are already standard in those research communities, say,
> > engineering, physics, operations research, statistics, systems science, just to
> > name the ones that I'm acquainted with.
> >
> > Jon Awbrey
> >
>
> I have read a number of discussion of event and process but
> none except those in formal ontologies have attempted to
> specify these terms in logical format suitable for
> computational purposes, ...
Much to the contrary, the definitions of events and processes in such fields,
all of them being variations on a very small number of themes, all of them
being already axiomatized and build up from basic mathematical concepts
like sets and functions, and typically extended by way of thoroughly
studied mathematical models, are the only ones that are currently
successful in providing critical reflective descriptions of our
most compelling realities, and they form the infrastructure
of all of the truly reliable computational models that
we presently enjoy.
It's true that -- once they leave the nests of their axiomatic bases --
yes, most of these scientific methodolgies currently have a tendency
to issue in quantitative and statistical models that are difficult
to relate to qualitative, logical, and natural language intuitions.
I have personally spent much time arguing with numerical/quantitative
folks that they need to get more lingusitic/qualitative savvy into their
models, but they are not going to do that at the expense of reducing
the descriptive and explanatory adequacy of their current theories.
It must be understood that the mythical number of person years that
have gone into developing systems like Cyc or SUMO are insignificant
in comparsion to the multitude of person years that have gone into
evolving something like the basic notions of a probability space,
a random variable, a stochastic process, a differential manifold,
a 1-parameter Lie group, a transformation semigroup, a program,
and on and on, all of which are highly "generic, meta, upper"
and so on. Nobody in the relevant research communties is
going to abandon any of this just because it's too hard
to re-write it in terms of pre-socratic commonplaces.
> and relate then to other concepts that will allow us to build
> cognitive systems which can support reasoning in a variety of
> fields. These **terms** are used in various senses in different
> communities, but in the present discussion group we are concerned
> with creating logical structures that will be useful in cognitive
> systems. Exactly which terms in which language and which jargon
> words in which technical community have these logical structures
> as their intended meanings is a matter for Natural Language
> Processing systems to untangle. If we do a good job, we
> should be able to help NLP systems do their job better.
> The tasks ar related but distinct.
Promises, promises. These communities having proving their theorems,
and betting their lives on the results, for hundreds and thousands
of years. They aren't sitting around speculating about the
imaginary powers of next year's vaporware theorem prover.
> If you have some specific suggestion with respect to how to represent
> the kinds of occurrences in the physical world which people variously
> call "events" "processes", "happenings", "occurrences" "situations",
> "perdurants", "state changes" or whatever, I would appreciate concrete
> suggestions. Your comments above can be interpreted to mean that we
> should all take our names off the list and do nothing, since it has
> obviously already been done before.
I am typing as fast as I can. Vide:
http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/thrd1.html
My comments should be interpreted to mean that there is a vast amount of work
yet to be done vis a vis creating interfaces between complementary perspectives,
for example, quantitative vs. qualitative models of dynamic processes, but that
progress is not going to come from styles of approach and directions of work
that pretty much exhausted their potential in 500 B.C.
> What specific "definitions of event or process that are already standard in those
> research communities, say, engineering, physics, operations research, statistics,
> systems science" did you have in mind? Can you provide the logical definitions
> and axiomatization for our benefit? I for one will be happy to have input from
> any constructive source. If in fact they are already standard, can you tell us
> what community uses them for what purpose? This thread is intended to discuss
> **specifics** of this particular concept class. There are other threads to
> discuss general issues.
Look, I can copy excerpts from basic texts until I'm blue in the links,
and I probably will, but it's going to have to occur to somebody that
all of this hard-won knowledge has something to do with the task of
getting actual knowledge in our knowledge bases, instead of thinking
that it would somehow be easier just to scrap it all and start from
scratch. Innovation is possible, but not by ignoring what's known.
Jon Awbrey
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