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Saturday, November 19, 2005

 

 The BCNGroup Beadgames

National Project à 

Challenge Problem  à

 Center of Excellence Proposal à

 

 

 

 

Discussion at ONTAC forum

 

 

 

Barry Smith:

There is visibility, interaction, effect in the world of drosophila,

for example. There they seem not to lead to service descriptions or policy.

 

Paul S Prueitt:

I am not sure how you feel about the OASIS draft (attached) Reference Model for Service Oriented Architectures.

 

 

Barry Smith:

A top-level ontology is designed to create the possibility for

interoperability between many lower-level domain ontologies. It is

not designed to substitute for the latter.

 

Paul S Prueitt:

A stratified ontology (as I have suggested) should have templates or specific types that assist the real time aggregation of atomic elements (parts of things with variable meaning depending on circumstance/context) into models of a specific situation/event.

 

Barry Smith:

I doubt that policy, or service description, are atomic elements. Do

you have a definition of 'atomic element'?

 

Paul S Prueitt:

The concept of a semantic primitive is not precise, but in some cases I would suggest that semantic primitives can be aggregated into a model of an event.  The model would then be in correspondence to the reality of the event, and the concepts - the set of concepts involved might be called an ontology, or better "an ontological model" of the event.

 

In my reading of C S Peirce, he felt that a concept was like a chemical compound - it is formed from an aggregation of "atoms".  The key, in the opinion of those who think about this like I do, in understanding this event chemistry notion is to reflect on the real physical different between quantum reality and chemical reality. 

 

Barry Smith:

At some point physics, biology, chemistry, etc. needed to

move beyond the point where games with loose rules that could be

played with little effort to find the truth. It is the thesis behind

the foundation of NCOR that ontology has reached that point.

 

 

Paul S Prueitt:

NCOR stands for the new National Center for Ontology Research, which I take it you are one of the founders.

 

I do not feel that you are understanding my notion of "loosely held". 

 

I know that there are many things that can be engineered, many "web services".  So this is not where the issue of stratification comes up.  If there is no emergence there is no need to move away from a purely Newtonian model. 

 

The concept of "loosely held" might be better stated as "underconstrained"... as in an emergent process involved in neurochemistry might be underconstrained if it were not for the actually presence of specific reactants in the environment of the process. 

 

I have written about this for a decade....  but have to admit that not many individual follow what I have been saying.  Some do.