RE: SUO: Unanimous consent
> > 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.
PG: I was refering to the second kind of maturity. Not the maturity of the
project's findings (anyway, longevity is not always a sign of maturity, you
will agree), but that of the document in its capacity as a proposal for being a
starter.
> 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.
PG: Agreed, of course
> 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.
PG: We could discuss this at length I imagine. Seems to me that a good
candidate starter would comport a reasonable amount of axiomatization (at least
the more fundamental features of the claims), doesn't mean that the
axiomatization needs to be perfect either. The work of the group would be to
correct as needed, expand, compare, and so on.
> > 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.
PG: Not sure if the above was clear. The point is this may be a good
contribution but seems to be an underspecified starter.
> MW: I think there are two key issues to consider here:
PG: These questions are releveant but not directly to whether your material
ought to be a starter or not, imho. My previous comments were not discussing
the actual theory.
> 1. Should there be a 4D ontology as part of the SUO work?
PG: There should be an ability to sustain a 4d ontology. I.e., there should be
an ability to deal with 4D entities. I think there should not be any claim
about which are what.
Your approach seems to provide a 4D ontology. It is, in my opinion, faulty in
that it commits to 4D. (Not sure what i'm saying is very clear.)
> 2. Is this a good start point? (if not suggest a better one)
PG: It might be, told you, can't tell. It actually depends on the relationships
there are and how they would be axiomatized.
> > 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?).
PG:
I'm sure Barry could find something to name SPOT. It's SNAP... for snapshot.
It's presentist, 3d, good old fashion Aristotelianism. The whole thing in which
SNAP and SPAN (which is primarily a temporal distinction) are articulated is
BFO.
I think SPAN (our 4D) can handle much of your ontology. Your ontology relates
to SNAP the way SPAN and SNAP relates. In our official linguo, your physical
objects are parts of lives of SNAP entities, they are SPAN entities themselves.
(Of course, calling them physical objects is pure terminological heresy.) It
seems that you handle participation as parthood, which is coherent with my BFO
parsing of your claims. We don't, there's no parthood relations between SNAP
and SPAN (apologies for the terminological endoctrination).
One difficulty is that you have processes with qualities (i.e., the t.p. part
of your car is red). It would be odd for us to think of redness as a property
of your car's life. What we mean is that the car's life is that of an entity
(the car) which happens to be red during the occurrence of one of the temporal
parts of such process (the life). The redness of the car (a particular) is on
the side of continuants.
Now, you can certainly introduce as many process-types as you want, but this
seems rather ad hoc. This is a general feature of processes which have their
properties necessarily and which let themselves best interpret as instances of
classes (class nominalistic properties). I didn't have time to look cloesly at
the way you handle properties, pardon me.
> > 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 :-)
Nice try, but it's probably a very sinful situation to commit so many
omissions...
> >
> > 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
I've seen it before, but I had forgotten about it.
> 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).
PG: One of the problem is the way you handle relations between physical object.
It seems that all relations are cases of underlap in a process (or activity,
unless that's too specific).
While we're at it and to go abck to earlier things about participation. Seems
to me that another problem with the paper is in the very claim that activities
are aggregates of individuals, e.g., a meeting is the sum of the participants.
Not sure that all parts of the participants are parts of the meeting the way
the participants are parts of the meeting. There's some form of shading which
occurs and can block transitivity on occasion. Maybe this is debatable, it also
has to do with modality I guess.
Yet another related issue is that you collapse identity into spatiotemporal
colocation. I think we discussed that already a few weeks ago. As I said at
that time, this is a strong rigidity of your approach (incidentally, it is not
a general feature of 4D).
> MW: I believe in any case that you should write things down in plain
> text before writing the axioms.
The problem is to know what to leave in plain text and what to formalize (a
slightly different problem is what can be left and what can be formalized).
> 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.
PG: I don't know what 'FDIS' means. Are there any preliminary public versions
approximating closely enough the final document and logs of the review process
available?
> > (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.
PG: As I understand it, this group aims at authoring a standard, not authoring
candidates. There is a risk of counter productivity here. From your standpoint
I understand this would be productive. From the group's standpoint it seems
that this would mean division of workforce and less focus on existing
documents.
P
>
> MW: I would also expect to keep an issues log on the document.
> >
> > Best,
> > Pierre
)+