Re: SUO: Unanimous consent
Re: the discussion of acceptability of SUO starter documents, and the lack
of criteria for same. (And indications of where people think they're going,
and how to get there.)
I've been browsing Matthew's contribution. It presents an interesting and
very possibly fruitful terminology (judging by the examples and informal
discussion available in the browser), but it does at this point lack (as
much as I've been able to see so far -- please correct me if I'm wrong)
some features which would clarify how the SUO group (in part or whole) is to
tackle it (or other proposals) as a working document -- that is, how to
proceed to develop it.
Since we currently lack them, this is an opportunity for the group to
formulate some at least minimally necessary criteria for acceptability of
officially sanctioned starter documents. I suggest, to begin with, that 1)
some formal specification of the language of an ontology should be required,
and 2) at least some formal axiomatization of content should be required,
together with an explicit indication, even if informal, of how
axiomatization is intended to be done. Finally, 3) that some
characterization of the logical system or systems intended to be employed in
automated reasoning over the ontology should be given.
Each of the 3 criteria above (particularly the formal aspects) will have to
be met at some point anyway, if a formal upper ontology is to fit into, say,
the IFF framework, or into a lattice of theories. Fleshing out even such
rough criteria as the above, and a minimal degree of completeness required
for them, will itself take a bit of work. But lacking such criteria, I don't
see how the group is to proceed to resolve subjective "conflicting
intuitions", such as have just come up in this thread.
Or, alternatively, since Matthew was originally asking how to proceed,
perhaps the group could distinguish a useful notion of increasing levels of
completion of starter documents, such as: terminological, axiomatic,
metalogically specified.
Jay