RE: SUO: Unanimous consent
Dear Matthew,
First let me sacrifice to good understanding practices and let me emphasize
that I did not intend to judge of the quality of this material. The main point
is probably and unfortunately again procedural. I see no reason to reject any
offer to consider any material while working on a starter document in order to
improve it. This is how I received your first post (as, due to email troubles,
I hadn't yet yesterday received a statement of a motion).
But your suggestion has been moved to a motion and the material to be discussed
as a potential starter on a par with SUMO and OpenCyc, in my understanding. And
for this purpose, as you hinted yourself, the material is immature. I would
have seen no reason to vote on accepting this as an expert contribution and
certainly no reason to reject this. As a starter, I would be much more
cautious.
In my humble opinion, the way to proceed would be to withdraw the motion and
simply register the material linked in a couple of your messages (browser and
flat file) as expert contribution. Then, after you have done the work of
turning this into an axiomatized full fledge ontology comprable to SUMO or
OpenCyc, it seems to me that this could be an interesting candidate for a
starter and that a motion could be submitted at that later time.
The problem as I see it is that, as it stands, this material is a potentially
interesting contribution to the initial declared objective of this group of
coming up with a SUO by contributing to the development of starter documents.
(I think it would profite the development of OpenCyc based document more than
that of SUMO). Incidentally, and to gloss on my own soup, it seems to me that
this is something which could communicate well with one part of our framework
here (that which Barry Smith as baptized SPAN as you know), provided we
recognize that terminology is not an issue (I could be hung on the marketplace
in Leipzig for saying this publicly).
On the other hand, it does not seem ready to stand as a component in an
articulated 'register', 'library' or modular ontology (not because of IFF). And
this has become another conflicting goal of a part of this group. It seems that
the group is going to accept material suitable for contributing to one goal in
order to motivate the other.
Re. Axioms. Of course, the taxonomic constraints are expressed axiomatically,
but this is not a strong claim. It's a minimum requirement. This is why a DL
would probably be enough to formalize the current state of the work. To be
fair, there are also a number of typing constraints on relations, but again,
this is sort of minimal requirement. Again, for this it seems that the DL
vocabulary of OWL could be enough. The problem is that taxonomical axioms give
you a taxonomy and not an ontological theory.
So, with respect to whether this is a good 4D ontology. I just can't tell.
There are good clues, such as your all encompassing domain of
possible_individual (which is scary term by the way) and some hints (mostly
implicit?) of an interesting mereological approach, although I'm not sure I
really see what temporal_part_whole exactly is. But it is hard for me to tell
after looking at this less than a handful of times. As far curiosity goes, it's
not clear how events relates to non event possible_individual (are they parts?
I can only remember something about referential involvement, there may be
another relationship). But, at the moment, this is essentially documentation
exegesis, a major problem for me is the lack of an axiomatization of these
concepts. (Which is also why I'm leery about the capacity of this document to
serve as a starter, which, again, seems to be the question at stake with the
motion.) It seems that I have to imagine what kind of axioms you will write in
order to understand what kind of theory you propound.
Best,
Pierre
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Pierre Grenon [mailto:pierre.grenon@ifomis.uni-leipzig.de]
> > Sent: 28 August 2003 13:10
> > To: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> > Subject: Re: SUO: Unanimous consent
> >
> >
> >
> > Robert Spillers wrote:
> > >
> > > SUO
> > > I move that Matthew West's motion be accepted by unanimous consent.
> > >
> >
> > I object. What's going on in this group? We just had two
> > years of long and
> > exhausting battles for voting on a couple of proposals which
> > were granted
> > examination under very stringent conditions.
>
> MW: Yes, part of my uncertainty is about what process we are now
> operating, given that there seemed to be some disatisfaction with
> the previous process.
>
> We could now be operating:
>
> 1. Propose it and it becomes part of the corpus to be worked with.
>
> 2. Follow the process that SUMO and IFF went through.
>
> I don't mind particularly.
> >
> > With all due respect, it is not clear whether Matthew's
> > motion fit requirements
> > previously imposed and I see no reason why we should weaken
> > the process
> > _prior_to_ examination of the material. From what I have
> > seen, the porposal
> > concerns a very small ontology which mostly stands as a
> > strcutured vocabulary
> > with some taxonomic constraints. It's actually a browsable glossary.
>
> MW: To be precise it is a data model.
>
> > I remember some very harsh words from different parties
> > concerning the need of
> > axioms for an ontology. This porposal does not fit the bill.
>
> MW: Taxonomic constraints are still axioms. But I am not suggesting
> that the material is a finished article, just some starting material.
> What I am seeking is that working this into something that is part of
> what the SUO delivers is recognised as a stream of work in this group.
> The current deliverable is already being standardised through ISO (as
> a data model) so it hardly needs endorsement here as it stands.
>
> > Moreover, although it is interesting to have a 4d ontology,
> > it is yet unclear
> > to me how this particular porposal does justice to this paradigm.
>
> MW: What evidence are you looking for?
> >
> > I request due time for examination (and two weeks is not
> > long!) and that
> > procedural issues be put aside during that time. We examine
> > the work, we
> > discuss and we cast motivated votes. This process may seem
> > heavy but it may be
> > the only feature of this group which comes close to the
> > activity of a working
> > group.
>
> MW: I have no problem with that.
> >
> > Pierre
> >
>