Sunday, November 27, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
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ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group
It is a working group of
Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)
We
are interested in hosting a discussion, and a conference, on this issue of
"the nature of logic" and the relationship of "logic" to
the type of computer science that is in the mainstream.
There is a movement attempting to demonstrate the case
that "something" like rough sets (which is felt to be superior to
fuzzy set/logic) is required to model formative processes, and to thus be the
foundational "logic" to support the interfaces between human
professional communities - such as medical community and intelligence community
in time of crisis.
The rough "set" is really an upper and lower
envelop on a categorical definition using overlapping categories as the upper
envelop and categorization that is incomplete (where the union of the category
membership does not cover the "semantic" space) is the lower
envelop. The corresponding "and", "not" and
"some" in rough logic does not produce "or" or an
"every" ... first of all. The
dependency on both the notion of completeness and the notion of consistency is
weakened .... in several respects. Quasi axiomatic theory can be seen to be in
line with rough logic.
"Crisp" rough sets, where the upper and lower
envelop are the same, produce classical
set theory. However, the issue of
completeness and consistency is not imposed on the inference rules as you do in
classical logic (so that the proof by contradiction cannot be appealed
to.)
This absence of proof by contradiction is the key to building schema independent knowledge bases.
Particularly with differences between human viewpoints, the formal ontology should not impose a requirement for precision and for consistency.
It is conjectured, based on specific evidence, that tf the
"IT system" does impose a rigid requirement for precision and for
consistency, it will both harm the world when there is a crisis, and ultimately
fail to be used by users who have become accustom to information system
dysfunction.
Anyway, the issue regarding logic is NOT the only
entrenched problem in the working groups.
The conference could be here in Taos in February, 2006. Date is yet to be determined.