SUO: RE: Re: An idea for making progress
Dear Jon,
Well I'm not too proud to admit I don't know everything.
Can you please tell me the essence of the difference between
Graph's and labelled graphs? (target 1-2 paragraphs).
Matthew West
Principal Consultant
Shell Information Technology International Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Other Tel: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.west@shell.com
Internet: http://www.shell.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawbrey@oakland.edu]
> Sent: 26 June 2003 14:48
> To: SUO
> Cc: Jim Schoening
> Subject: SUO: Re: An idea for making progress
>
>
>
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> Jim, I correct some typos, continue, and focus my last comment.
>
> JA: I agree with Bob. I do not think that we should have
> any more voting, except to admit additional documents
> to preliminary consideration, for another year or so.
> Scientific and technical issues are simply not best
> decided that way. Nor will it do anything in support
> of your recent remarks about achieving consensus, since
> all of our voting periods have been extremely divisive,
> putting the contributors of documents in a defensive,
> if not evasive position, instead of encouraging them
> to seek out the advice and critique that they need.
>
> JA: The ongoing discussions and debates of this membership have
> been positively full of "serious comments on what members
> want to see incorporated in the document[s]", and though
> I know that you did not mean it that way, it is perhaps
> a little insulting to the membership to suggest that
> comments are not "serious" unless they are directed
> toward an active ballot.
>
> JA: My present comment is this. My consistent, long-standing,
> and very serious suggestion as to what should be incorporated
> in the prospective SUO, at least, any component or module of it
> that is intended in support of critical, educational, engineering,
> research, and scientific applications, is that it absolutely must
> incorporate, in a usable manner, the content of basic
> undergraduate
> knowledge, hopefully extendible in the direction of
> graduate expertise,
> in all of the relevant subject matters and methods. I am
> taking it on
> faith, but only provisionally, that IFF has staked out a
> big enough tent
> for this, and John Sowa has told us that this was an
> initial intention of
> Doug Lenat in the Cyc project. But it will take an order
> of work far more
> "serious" than the mere casting of ballots in order to
> accomplish these very
> worthwhile goals.
>
> JA: In particular, there are several miles of stratosphere,
> and not a little
> vacuum of space, between where we stand and the exalted
> heights of IFF.
> And though I would not for a moment wish to block
> anybody's view of
> this nor any other of the beautiful blue skies that are constantly
> being gesticulated at over our heads, I am a building up from
> the earth sort of worker, and there is much to do within my
> demesne in humble support of all these grand mansions and
> greater visions. So I will now get back to work on that.
>
> I've been making the motto of my contributions to this working group
> for the last month or so to be "keep it concrete and simple" (KICAS).
>
> In that spirit, let me focus the thrust of my comment on a single
> very critical point. It's a single point, but it goes under two
> names: "logical equivalence" and "mathematical isomorphism".
>
> The beginning of wisdom in mathematics and computer science
> turns on being able to recognize when people who appear to
> be talking about very different-looking things are really
> talking about the exact same thing. That ought to sound
> familiar. This idea is crucial to category theory, one
> of the recognized cornerstones of which is the paper by
> Eilenberg & Mac Lane on the "General Theory of Natural
> Equivalences" (GTONE) from 1945, and RK has recently
> and rightly stressed its place in the IFF approach.
> These ancient names of equivalence and isomorphism --
> much like rabbits there's no such thing as just 2 --
> are about to multiply their names beyond all hope
> of recapture now that the hutches of the webfloks
> have latched onto them, but they have amounted
> to the first stepping stones of logical and
> mathematical maturity for a long time now.
>
> That is not the KICAS part, but I'm getting to it now.
>
> A humble instance of the concept of isomorphism shows up in
> the basic distinction between "graphs" and "labeled graphs",
> where graph theorists generally use the unadorned term for
> their default concept, namely, the abstract graph, or the
> graph defined only "up to isomorphisms", as they say.
>
> This distinction is a first element of the minimal curriculum,
> usually taken up just after midterms of the typical undergrad
> course in combinatorics or discrete math, and refreshed right
> after drops-&-adds of the typical grad course in graph theory.
>
> I have looked with some diligence through the SUMO document,
> and a little more half-heartedly through the OpenCyc text,
> for any hint that they recognize the distinction between
> graphs and labelled graphs, under any of its commonly
> used aliases. And I can find no expression of this
> basic bit of knowledge in these "knowledge bases".
> Now, it's certainly conceivable to me that the
> needle is there in some hayestack of disguise
> or another, so I will just ask:
>
> Can any of the champions or familiars of these two systems,
> OpenCyc and SUMO, point me to where the fundamental distinction
> between graphs and labeled graphs is encrypted in their documents,
> so that I might examine its cogency with respect to the established
> standards in graph theory?
>
> Thanks In Prospect,
>
> Jon Awbrey
>
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