Monday, December 12, 2005
A common, widely used, and available ontology
with UDEF (Universal Date Element Framework)
underneath
Footnotes, with extensions, made as responses
to Cory’s note à [295]
1) We
are interested in what John has to say about this. The main point is that this separation can occur only if the
rational for separating the logic and the concept specification is
accepted. This acceptance will be given
only under extraordinary conditions, one of them being (1) no work is required
to do the separation and (2) that the separation can be reversed with very
little work.
Some of us do belief that both of these
conditions can be meet. The current
discussion is an attempt to come to some agreement within as least a small
community and then make the completed “understanding” available to the wider
community. (Does this seem is ok?)
There are some fine points about what it might
mean to separate logic from concepts, with a possible implication that without
the logic the concepts losses some of its meaning. This is an understandable fine point.
However, there is also the alternate fine
point that any logic imposes restrictions on flexibility and that this
flexibility is what human’s use in interpretation of stimulus leading to a
concept becoming resident in the mind (or some thing like that). The phenomenon of “making an interpretation”
can be traced in scientific literatures to the aggregation of memory traces,
anticipation and situated-ness. I do
this elsewhere, as do others.
2) It is also easy to see, and find examples
of cases where, procedural or logical formulization “selects” statements that
are not the complete context, or has misleading information in it. It is clearly true that human mental
awareness has a similar problem, but with the biological problem comes massive
biological machinery related to sense making and coherence. We suggest the separation of a specification
of the ontology concepts from any mechanisms for supporting “computational
reasoning”, “semantic extraction” or other formal treatment of the concept
representations.
3) There is so much about this statement that
is important, in my opinion. A specific
context is naturally a “phenomenological category”. By using this phrase, I mean that something is a context if it
has been experienced before. So the
“truncation” of actual events (the ontology of a specific event) occurs in ways
that are dictated precisely by communities and by repeated action-perception
cycles in individuals (as discussed a great deal by J J Gibson and the school
of ecological psychology that was founded on his (1950s) work.)
4) I
expect that this is where facets and algebra of toposes comes in. Our concern is that a theory of facets be
reflective of some observational science like metabolic reaction pathways.
I know that many do not understand why we
bring in biology at this point, and this is something that might be discussed
further when we examine that part of the SUMO and was merged from the Basic Formal Ontology developed by Barry Smith. The work, the BFO of Smith, has sufficient
characteristics and I am encouraged that issues like Edelman’s notion of
response degeneracy can be discussed using the ontology concepts extracted from
the BFO.
5) Underneath Sowa’s work there is a specific notion about semantic primitives, and this gives all of his work a degree of dimensional – but the issue is bring forward the degeneracy of viewpoint formation. I need to know the language better here… John?