RE: SUO: Unanimous consent
Dear Pierre,
See comments below.
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: Pierre Grenon [mailto:pierre.grenon@ifomis.uni-leipzig.de]
> Sent: 28 August 2003 15:20
> To: West, Matthew R SITI-ITPSIE
> Cc: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> Subject: 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).
MW: This was Jim's interpretation of my original post.
> 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.
MW: As far as maturity goes, this work is part of a stream
that goes back at least 15 years - which puts it on a par
with CYC, and somewhat ahead of SUMO. However, it is not as
completely axiomatised - which is a different question.
MW: It is not clear to me that any particular degree of
completeness is required for a starter document. Pretty
much by definition a starter document is not finished. In ISO
where I am used to the way things work, you can make a New
Work Item Proposal with either a statement of the intended
work area, or with anything up to a finished document. The
only thing that is important is to be clear about what you
have as a start point and where you are going. I think I
meet those criteria. As far as I can see the main reason
to make a proposal is to try to gather support (and possibly
effort) around doing some work.
> 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.
MW: I think there are two key issues to consider here:
1. Should there be a 4D ontology as part of the SUO work?
2. Is this a good start point? (if not suggest a better one)
> 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.
MW: I would rather have an indication of support, and perhaps some
help doing it.
>
> 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.
MW: This is all we have at the moment.
> (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).
MW: Actually it would be even more interesting to see how to
communicate with the other part (SPOT?).
> 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.
MW: Then at least we can say that there probably aren't many
mistakes yet :-)
>
> 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.
MW: If you want to understand the ontology and where the
axioimatisation will go I suggest looking at:
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/Documents/Spatio-temporal-Paradigm.pdf
MW: I'm updating it at the moment, but mostly about references
rather than basic content. That should help with temporal whole/part
(usually used to indicate that some possible individual - a state -
is a temporal part of some whole_life_individual).
MW: I believe in any case that you should write things down in plain
text before writing the axioms.
MW: The full FDIS document also provides a great deal more material
than the model, and I commend it to you as someone seriously
interested. It should be published in the next few weeks. You can
probably get it through the Univeristy, but I'm afraid ISO it has
to be bought.
> (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.
MW: Not really. By making it a starter document I am actually in
principle putting the control of the addition of axioms with the
group, rather than being just what I think.
MW: It is not particularly how SUMO and IFF have worked in practice,
but I would certainly expect to make proposals for axioms in particular
areas that were under the scrutiny of the group, rather than my own
whim. I would be editor (perhaps) rather than author.
MW: I would also expect to keep an issues log on the document.
>
> 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
> > >
> >
>