Discussion at ONTAC forum

ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group

It is a working group of

Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)

Note from Paul in response

Note from Ken Ewell, founder of Readware Inc

Hello Paul and everyone.

Intention and entailment both play significant roles in interpretation of a state of affairs. These roles may be psychosemantic but If we are to have something called "semantics" in computing, it only seems natural that those semantics should have something to say about the psychosemantics of intention (human intentions or goals) and entailment (expansive yet coherent possibilities).

Barry brings up a good point in the introduction of Basic Formal Ontology for Bioinformatics, with his co-writers. I think the primary point is glossed over very much. It is about the meaning of the term “ontology”.

I know that I have to struggle with it, whenever I speak about ontology in an IT environment.

Barry cites Gruber and writes that "Two senses of ‘ontology’ can be distinguished in the current literature. First is the sense favored by information scientists, who view ontologies as software implementations designed to capture in some formal way the consensus conceptualization shared by those working on information systems or databases in a given domain. [Gruber 1993]" and "Second is the sense favored by philosophers, who regard ontologies as theories of different types of entities (objects, processes, relations, functions) [Smith 2003]."

I for one am thankful that there are practioners like Barry Smith who write clearly about the matter.

When Paul speaks of Ontology, he, like a few others, and me mean, ontology, in the philosophical sense. – (note added by Paul - but also hopefully in a scientific sense.)

We, few, are searching for ways to realize this philosophical sense of ontology through the use of mathematics and computer science, and to bring to computers the capacity to compute with words. You may correct me if I am wrong to include you, Paul.

So in essence, when Paul rails against the W3C and logical inference, some haven't a clue what he is about. Someday the industry will change and engage the philosophical/scientific side to things, else the semantic web, as we know it today, will become irrelevant.

I believe it is possible to compute with words and natural language. But it will not happen until there is a uniform and accepted "upper" or "base" ontology for computers. Just as computers did not gain widespread application until there was a uniform code of information interchange, there is no chance for "knowledge" computing until these issues about ontology and human knowledge are settled.

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Notes by Paul:

I agree with what Ken is saying. He and I know each other’s minds well enough to interpret properly and see the agreements and slight disagreements.

In this case, there is only a need to clarify about what might he and I mean by “knowledge” computing.

Clearly, in my reading of his words – at least - he is not supporting the types of classical philosophical logic based on classes and membership.

John, you seem comfortable with these notions and I cannot see why you are? Perhaps you can explain?

From rough and fuzzy sets to forcing on axiomatic structures; there has been a lot of work done to show that classical notion of set membership and class membership fails to provide the foundation for knowledge computing.

Polylogics is something that approaches the issue of response degeneracy that I asked Barry, Mathew, Ralph and Jim about. But this type of work cannot see the market because the market is really not open to alternatives (innovation) that start with the assertion that Aristotle’s logic cannot model complex reality in a way that would support general knowledge computing.

It is suggested in private notes that I have alienated everyone. I try not too, but somehow the practices of this community in establishing private languages, such as the use of the letters “HIT”, has to be commented on. And if an agreement is referenced by literatures that are not accessable then, will then perhaps one might be able to complain?

Why should we pretend that progress is made when it is not; or that things should be simple to understand properly when things are confused by where we are in history. This issue of not facing the truth is why Penrose titled his 1989 book, The Emperor’s New Mind”, in reference to the fable “The Emperor who wore no cloths.? And if the chair of the working group insists on not acknowledging the universal judgment that a single upper ontology is not realizable, well why is it not proper to chastise him about this.

The fact is that I and Ken actually propose a single “substructural ontology” might be possible if we approached ontology (the theory of reality) in a stratified fashion.

But as long as the issues of (human) interpretation and (physical/event) emergence are not addressed in most of the literature that the chair and others site; then Ken and I can not talk about substructural aggregation, Peirce and entailments other than “inference”.

But I do not mean to offend anyone personally. It is the content of the communications that I am engaging.