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Dear Disputants,
As participants of the SUO community, we are
supposed to preach a formal ontological analysis in lieu of using vague logical
speculations and epistemological arguments. Since it is plain that to get to the
bottom of a thing, namely, whether it is or not, what it is, why
it is, and how it exists, the thing ought to be subject to strict
ontological anatomy supported with scientific data and mathematical findings.
This is also true of the matter discussed and
questioned, 'boundary', 'bound', or 'bounds', which some contemporary
ontologists proposed as a top-level category along with states, substances, and
individuals, defining boundaries as individuals which are not substances (R.
Chrisholm).
Generalizing most adequate definitions, 'the
boundary' comes up as a limitary thing, the nature and meaning of which is
bounded up with another essential member of ontological lexicon,
'limit'. Then the matter becomes if not crystal clear but more
understandable. The Father of Formal Ontology teaches us that 'limit is the
form, whatever it may be, of a spatial magnitude or of a thing that has
magnitude', 'the last point of each thing' or 'the end of each thing'. What may
be formulated as the follows: 'boundary is a sort of entity (an object, state,
magnitude, action, process, etc.) beyond which something else ceases to be,
exist, extend, act, or operate'.
It seems everything in this world of finite
individuals is limited or bounded either as being the boundary of or
contained within the limits and bounds of something else, except the
universe itself encompassing all sorts of bounds; for we can't imagine
some containing body whereby it may be bounded, confined, or
bordered.
As a consequence of such nature and meaning,
the where or when of a thing marks the boundary of its existence. For instance,
'the now' is not only the link but also a limit and boundary line of time,
infinite or finite, since it serves as the beginning of the future and the
end of the past. Also, place as a part of space and its relative position is the
boundary of the body which it contains or confines.
There is a variety of special senses of the
underlying notion of 'boundary' such as barrier, border, bound,
circumference, confines, end, edge, demarcation, enclosure, frontier, landmark,
line, limitation, margin, outline, term, termination, fringe, periphery,
perimeter, verge, brink, threshold.
In physics, we speak of boundary layers or
strata as helopause as well as different surface phenomena; in mathematics,
of the boundary conditions of differential equations or of the line (or plane,
surface, volume) determining the limit (extent) of magnitude; in
biology, of the boundary species or the boundary states between life and death;
in psychology, of the boundary conditions of consciousness; in
geography, of the shoreline between water and land, land boundary of a nation,
state boundary, political borders, the landmarks dividing the territories,
three-mile limit, country, district, city, or
property line.
Thus the central sense of boundary apears to be a
limit which is some entity (an object, magnitude as a point, line, surface, or
volume, a process, or a relation) that keeps within bounds something else
placing a limit on its extent, time, place, action, etc.
Hope my commentary shed some light on this rather
complex matter.
As for the matter of part and whole relationship,
its nature, meaning and possible types, please refer to the site indicated
below.
Regards,
Azamat Abdoullaev
EIS Encyclopedic Intelligent Systems
LTD
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 12:57
AM
Subject: RE: CG: Re: Re: Whole and Parts
(and boundaries)
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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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.
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