[Person-ontology] Methodology using an upper ontology

[Adam Pease]

Pat,
   It's hard to avoid responding to this.  But I'll try to avoid much 
follow up so that we don't rehash the SUO debates.  It's important for 
other folks on this list at least to know there is another opinion.
   First, you've picked a very unrealistic and philosophically 
challenging concept as your example.  If we pick something more 
practical, like the concept of "Human" there is a wealth of boring, 
practical content in an upper ontology, such as SUMO, that helps in 
defining what a &%Human is (an &%Agent, that can initiate 
&%IntentionalProcess(es) etc) and what relations it has to the world. 
Maybe a long time ontologist such as yourself can churn out in a few 
hours all the content that a CRM system might need to define a Human and 
its attributes, participation in actions, constraints on values and so 
forth, but for the rest of us, there's so much uncontroversial content 
in SUMO that reuse makes sense.  You'll always be able to find difficult 
boundary cases, and maybe the reuse won't be perfect, but as with 
software engineering (I know you challenge this analogy as well) reuse 
is proven to save time and increase quality.

Adam

Pat Hayes wrote:
>> 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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