Re: SUO: Monolithic ontologies (was ontology as science)
Pat,
If you had an application that required you to reason about a muscle as
both a BodyPart and Food you could simple define a particular instance as
such. This might be unsatisfying to someone who wants (for some reason) a
pure treatment that somehow separates out classes from contexts and roles,
but I don't see that it causes a practical problem in knowledge
representation. Do you have an example that shows a problem?
I don't think the issue of roles is particular to a 3D approach, but to
your specific question of how to represent PartTimeStudent (leaving aside
for the moment whether that deserves to be reified), it would presumably be
a &%subAttribute of &%Student.
To specify the characteristics of Student, one could use axioms, just as
for the definition of any other term, for example
(=>
(attribute ?X Student)
(capability EducationalProcess patient ?X))
Adam
At 10:49 PM 7/1/2003 -0400, Patrick Cassidy wrote:
>Adam,
> Thanks for the response. A follow-up here:
>
>Adam Pease wrote:
>[Pat Cassidy wrote]
>
>>> If roles cannot be classes, then do you consider SUMO
>>>classes like "Food" and "BiologicallyActiveSubstance"
>>>as *not* being roles which might change for a particular object?
>>
>>I'm guessing that you're concerned about cases like the same substance
>>being used as a floor wax or a dessert topping, but as I see it, it would
>>still be a food, just as a table could be used as a chair, or a TV as a
>>hammer, but they would still be tables and TVs, respectively.
> I'm not particularly concerned about artifacts, it is just
>certain things like "Food" that I wonder about. The gloss for
>"Food" in SUMO reads:
>
> "Any &%SelfConnectedObject containing &%Nutrients, such as
> carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, that can be ingested by a living
> &%Animal and metabolized into energy and body tissue."
>
> The muscle of any live animal would seem to qualify, including
>human muscle. Wood is food for termites. It would seem that
>any part of any living thing can serve as food for some
>animal, so if Food is not a role that depends on context,
>what is the distinction between Food and living things generally?
>Could you not just have "Organism" as one subclass of "Food"?
>(Even bacteria can be food for protozoans, and fungi for ants).
>
>
>Another class that to me has some character of a "role" is
>"BiologicallyActiveSubstance". The gloss reads:
>
>"A &%Substance that is capable of inducing a change in the structure or
>functioning of an &%Organism. This &%Class includes &%Substances used in
>the treatment, diagnosis, prevention or analysis of normal and abnormal
>body function. This &%Class also includes &%Substances that occur
>naturally in the body and are administered therapeutically. Finally,
>&%BiologicallyActiveSubstance includes &%Nutrients, most drugs of abuse,
>and agents that require special handling because of their toxicity."
>
> Consider a synthetic substance invented by a chemist, which years
>later is discovered to have therapeutic activity. Was this always a
>"biologically active substance"? How does one classify substances
>used traditionally in medicine which are discovered to actually
>have no biological activity at all? If a species evolves to
>become sensitive to something that previously had no effect
>on organisms (say, an allergen), would that also always have
>been a biologically active substance?
> I suppose you can use the "uses" relation in specific instances
>for some of these cases that are borderline, but without a class
>that expresses a role, it's not obvious how all these things can be
>related to each other.
>
>
>As to roles of humans:
>
> > Those sorts of roles have been treated as properties. Take a look
> > at SocialRole
><http://ontology.teknowledge.com:8080/rsigma/SKB.jsp?req=SC&name=SocialRole&skb=SUMO>
>
> OK, so using this it would seem that "Student" would have to be an
>instance of a SocialRole. Is that right? If "Student" is not a
>class, how would SUMO express the relation between "Student" and
>"PartTimeStudent"? "collegeStudent"? Or between "Physician" and
>"Surgeon"? How do you specify what the characteristics of
>a "Student" are?
>
> Most ontologies I have seen allow many roles as classes. I'm
>curious how one can do without them in 3D.
>
> Pat
>
>=============================================
>Patrick Cassidy
>
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