Doug
I think that on the
problem of long border crossing we have at more than the two “major ontological
categories” you propose, or at least that some of the concepts might have to be
extended. I agree that the 2 that you propose are a useful starting
point:
- an arbitrary physical border
between tracts of land that are respectively
claimed by two human social
sovereignties.
- the social border between those
social sovereignties.
If I have these modeled I should be
able to answer quite a few questions about long borders.
But I can think of exceptions to
this way of defining long border in the first sense. Two sovereignties may claim territory
that intersect and thus we have a “disputed border” in which there may be little
or no physical border BETWEEN the tracts.
So perhaps I have a different category or a
sub-type.
I don’t know if you followed Sowa’s
earlier link to an article on “knowledge soup” In his discussion he offered some examples of problems
with tight, neat definitions of concepts.
Applying some of his problem types to the border issue I came up with the
following examples.
Overgeneralizations: (example is Birds fly, but
what about penguins?) Borders
separate territories, but what if it is a disputed border?
Abnormal conditions: You cross
borders, but what if there is
a fight at the border? What if
there is a terrorist alert? Your
passport has expired? There is an earthquake?
Incomplete definitions: Is the concept
of “no man’s land” included? Does
it cover boundaries between things like the atmosphere and “outer
space”
Conflicting defaults: You can see the
Demasiado Corazon soap opera in Mexico, but not
on US stations. Except you
can get it via a satellite broadcast.
Just as you can a TBS show in Mexico.
The point might be that when we try
to build our formal models we are not typically including all this knowledge
that humans know as adaptive agents working pragmatically based on interacting
with the world.
Even in infancy we seem to distinguish 2 types of object categorization.
One is perceptual categorization, which is part of perceptual processing based
on perceptual similarity of one object to another. As we develop we create
perceptual schemas of what objects look like.
Older infants develop
a conceptual categorization, that seems to be based on what objects do. One way of thinking of this more
abstract type is as a restructuring of perceptual information into conceptual
form. One basis for this is the
experience of paths that objects
take and the interactions among objects along these paths. Experience creates a
simple mental model of a notion of kinds, such as animals, vehicles, furniture,
plants etc.. Underlying this kind of categorization seems to be functional roles
played in events, rather than the
physical appearance of the objects. Speculating we might propose that evolution
has selected us to be able to build schemas involving such broad categories to
operate effectively in the world. Unanticipated applications come up
all the time and we have to accommodate to the new demands. We can speculate about pragmatic based
processes to do this. If some
concept becomes the “expectation” part of a sufficiently reliable schema, then
this concept is compared with the concepts at the basic level of
abstractedness and a process tries to determine the common parts between
the concepts. If the difference is less than a certain amount, then a new
abstract concept might be added. Sowa has a more structured
discussion of a pragmatic cycle.
While human cognition and knowledge
can do this, our formal cognition and knowledge bases still have difficulty with
this. For one thing we haven’t
fleshed out architectures for the pragmatic cycle.
Gary
Berg-Cross
-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas McDavid
[mailto:mcdavid@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Tue 7/19/2005 7:31 PM
To: Gary Berg-Cross
Cc: John A. Bateman; Murray Altheim;
owner-standard-upper-ontology@IEEE.ORG; sowa@BESTWEB.NET;
standard-upper-ontology@IEEE.ORG
Subject: RE: CG: Re: Re: Whole and
Parts (and boundaries)
With respect to the problem of long border crossings, it seems
to me that
we have at least two major ontological categories in play
here. One is the
arbitrary physical border between tracts of land
that are respectively
claimed by two human social sovereignties. The
other is the social border
between those social sovereignties. The
former is a fictional plane
(height and length, but no depth) separating
the territory of two
geopolitical jurisdictions. This aspect of the
boundary is physically
crossed in a second or less, once one is in a
socially negotiated position
to do so. The other boundary is a power
nexus which must be negotiated
prior to making the final, physical movement
through the arbitrary
geophysical demarkation
plane.
Yes?
Doug McDavid
Business Transformation
Architect
IBM Academy of Technology - http://www-306.ibm.com/ibm/academy/index.html
mcdavid@us.ibm.com
408-927-1565
(IBM tie-line:
457)
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| "Gary
Berg-Cross"
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<gary.berg-cross@em-i.com>
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| Sent
by:
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owner-standard-upper-ontolo|
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gy@IEEE.ORG
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| 07/14/2005 01:44
PM
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>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
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|
To: "John A. Bateman"
<bateman@UNI-BREMEN.DE>, "Murray Altheim"
<m.altheim@open.ac.uk>
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|
cc: <sowa@BESTWEB.NET>,
<standard-upper-ontology@IEEE.ORG>
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| Subject: RE: CG: Re:
Re: Whole and Parts (and
boundaries)
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>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
I
generally agree with John Bateman's contextual discussion on goal
and
functions affecting what boundary means (“ontological
characterizations.”
As John described it). The experimental work on
robot-human interactions
in spatial settings provides real data as I
suggested in my earlier message
drawing on epigenetic robotics.
I
think that his statement
>"It took us three hours to cross the
border."…..Sounds pretty thick to me.
suggests how linguistic data
gives very useful indications. It’s thru our
own mental models which
we use in turn for
> modelling decisions relevant for
building
>ontologies, but only when listened to.
There is a
degree of commonality to our own experience based mental models
as
designers of ontological models from insights offered by linguistic data
we
have to be aware that our lifelong developed mental models will
differ.
That’s one reason that letting robots develop their own models
rather than
building them in offers some check on unconscious bias.
Of course we have
realize that our general design principles for developing
cognition may
also be flawed and have to be reformulated.
Gary
Berg-Cross
-----Original
Message-----
From:
owner-standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org on behalf of John
A.
Bateman
Sent: Thu 7/14/2005 7:57 AM
To: Murray
Altheim
Cc: sowa@BESTWEB.NET;
standard-upper-ontology@IEEE.ORG
Subject:
Re: CG: Re: Re: Whole and Parts (and
boundaries)
> I have no real
data about people talking about boundaries,
> but I have some info about people talking about walls
--
> i.e., whether a wall is part of a
room or a boundary
> between rooms or
whether part of the wall is part of the
>
room or part of the wall is part of the
boundary.
>
> If you ask them, people have an
incredible number of
> different thoughts
ranging from confusion, to irritation,
>
to lengthy and irrelevant discourses on the topic --
and
> essentially all of those responses
are useless for any
> serious kind of
application.
These kinds of issues are
ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL for
any one to make any
statements about 'how people
do things'. As
John S. says, if you haven't collected
(or
have access to) the data where people are
actually
going about tasks trying to solve
problems involving
the concepts, then it is
better to say nothing.
In my own group,
putting people in situations where they
have
to talk about and solve spatial problems is
the fundamental methodology without which we
say
nothing about 'how people' do
stuff
(http://www.sfbtr8.uni-bremen.de/i1).
On the basis
of these experiments (usually
robot-human
interactions in spatial
settings),
we propose ontological
characterisations.
Absolutely obvious, is
that characterisations depend
on goal and
functions. So even the word 'boundary'
is
not yet sufficiently defined to say much
that
is sensible, but as soon as it is used
in context,
that complexity usually
vanishes.
Example:
> For example, when lay people
(as opposed to geographers
>>or
politicians) talk about the boundary between
two
>>countries, they generally don't
think about the thickness
>>of the
boundary.
Absolute nonsense.
Data:
"It took us three hours to cross
the border."
Sounds pretty thick to
me.
As soon as one then attempts to
'explain away' the
usage (e.g., "well, they
were not strictly talking about
the border
but about the road up to the crossing point,
which is actually a line of no thickness"), I
think
the point has been missed. Either you
use the
linguistic data or not. If not,
fine, then we
can go with boundaries defined
mereotopologically,
fiat or otherwise). If
linguistic data
('how people think
about...'),
then it should be done properly.
That's my
only point here I think. I believe
the
linguistic data do give very useful
indications
of modelling decisions relevant
for building
ontologies, but only when
listened to.
John
B.