[Person-ontology] Methodology using an upper ontology

[Aldo Gangemi]

Pat, it is a bit unfair that, since you have so much time to  
criticize reusable ontologies (and almost everything else in the  
world, it seems), you do not actually contribute to do at least one  
ontology that is actually applied, and possibly show that reusability  
is useless on a practical ground.

The same argument you make can be made at any level of detail,  
therefore, your (and Lenat's) claim is just a slogan. E.g., for an  
expert in a specific branch of biomedicine, even the best biomedical  
ontology will be useless in your sense, because it would be too broad  
to catch any useful semantics to her.
For me, the actual point is to enable users to do decent ontologies,  
whether or not they can read DOLCE or anything else. I can use Latex  
without knowing much about the compiler.

On my side, I am too busy in making real applications of reusable  
ontologies, or content design patterns, as I prefer ("upper level" is  
old fashioned guys). So sorry for not commenting this in more detail :)

Cheers
Aldo

Il giorno 29/ott/07, alle ore 22:06, Pat Hayes ha scritto:

>> All,
>>
>> It was posted (not sure by who):
>>
>> 	"Construct an ontology. It almost does not matter exactly where
>> you
>> 	start, but either the very top (most general) or the very bottom
>> 	(data) is not usually a good place."
>
> Me (Pat Hayes). Though the advice comes originally from Doug Lenat.
>
>> Question: Why not use an existing upper ontology?
>
> Well, question back: Why use it? What would it be useful for? Here we
> are, say, trying to formalize a mid-level concept, say 'ocean wave'
> (Im making this up), using BOF, say. BOF requires us to classify
> ocean wave 'properly'. In particular, we must decide whether or not
> it is a continuant. Well, is it or isn't it? Do you know? I don't.
> Moreover, I don't CARE. Nothing turns on this decision other than
> making BOF happy. THe high-level upper ontology is just getting in
> the damn way, forcing me to make decisions I don't care about, are
> irrelevant to my concerns and that have no obvious answer. Suppose,
> moreover, I toss a coin and decide that my wave is indeed a
> continuant. Is this any help? No: all it does is make it harder for
> me to say some natural things (since continuants aren't allowed to
> have temporal parts).
>
> Suppose instead I am using DOLCE and formalizing, say, the W3C TAG
> notion of a 'web resource', and I decide that a web resource is kind
> of like a 'place' where some information can be stored. So I look in
> DOLCE and I find a high-level notion of 'region'. The only way to
> decide whether or not I can put my notion under this heading is to go
> into the actual axioms of DOLCE (which is a bit like taking a bath in
> nitric acid, by the way) and see what it actually says about
> 'regions', paying attention to detail and asking 'does this axiom
> apply to my idea'? And this is just writing axioms, only way slower.
>
>>  Wouldn't it provide a
>> good-enough top-down structure?  Wouldn't it also provide many (maybe
>> half) of the needed concepts?
>
> No, it almost certainly would not provide any of them in the form I
> am likely to need them, since the people who built it the upper
> ontology, no matter how smart or well-meaning they were, weren't
> thinking about the issues that arise at my level of detail: so
> whatever they put into the UO, its very unlikely to be anything more
> than a provisional sketch or draft of what I am going to need.
> Mereologists often take it as obvious that partOf is transitive,
> because they are thinking about lumps of clay: but if I'm making an
> ontology for a parts catalog, parthood isn't transitive. So for me,
> all that the UO has done is stolen the term 'part' and forced me to
> use a different term for my concept. Im going to have to write my own
> axioms for it anyway.
>
> Upper ontologies, by and large, are no actual use to practical
> ontologizing at all. They warp intuitions and interfere with the
> process, like an exasperating micro-manager. They add nothing
> computationally useful, since almost nothing useful can be said at a
> very high level. They usually embody some a priori philosophical
> perspective which likely has no relevance to the actual topic under
> discussion. Whoever wrote them wasn't thinking about the topic, for
> sure.
>
>> Of course, in parallel, gather
>> requirements and work from the bottom up.
>
> The danger is that these two parallel tracks might not actually meet
> anywhere. And the worse danger is that when this happens, the
> top-down track is usually treated as authoritative, since to change
> an entrenched 'upper' ontology is seen as harmful to interoperation.
> So we end up with a situation where the entire shape of the whole
> ontology has been formed by people who don't know squat about the
> actual subject-matter: kind of a pre-emptive Peter Principle at work.
>
> Pat
>
>>
>> Jim Schoening
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_____________________________________

Aldo Gangemi

Senior Researcher
Laboratory for Applied Ontology
Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technology
National Research Council (ISTC-CNR)
Via Nomentana 56, 00161, Roma, Italy
Tel: +390644161535
Fax: +390644161513
aldo.gangemi at istc.cnr.it

http://www.loa-cnr.it/gangemi.html

icq# 108370336

skype aldogangemi



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