[topicmapmail] what I mean by "context" and "bottom-up"

[Martin Bryan]

Bernard

If its hair-splitting you want you have come to the right place ;-)

> Not necessarily "A community" - its often a set of communities, as the
> current ebXML work for electronic business semantics illustrates clearly.
> 
> <definition problem>
> As soon as people have to share their ontology, aren't they de facto a
> community ... even if they don't feel like it to begin with? In maths, a
> set is defined by the sharing of a common characteritic property, does that
> definition hold there? It's true that the term "community" is widely used
> now and maybe in a too fuzzy way. Since we are you and me there trying to
> define things, do you feel like we are in the same community? There is kind
> of bootstrapping definition : community is defined by the context they
> share, context is defined by community sharing it.
> </definition problem>

Let me use your own community to disprove the concept of it being singular. You are a mathmetician - correct? Now my brother was trained as a statistician, and a friend of our is currently considering being trained as an actuary. Now consider what the term "number" means to yourself and to my two "mathematicians". (Or try to determine what set means to the three of you!) They share a common term, they do not share a common definition, but they do share a set of processes that can be applied in certain contexts to these objects. They also have processes specific to their disciplines that the associate with the same term.

Now let me take you to another sort of community. The set of processes involved in sending goods from one country to another. The involved parties are Manufacturer, Stockist, Shipper, Customs, Customer. They may all have a different terminology for the same concept: perhaps called BatchSize, PurchasableUnit, PackedQuantity, ShippedQuantity and QuantityOrdered. They can agree on the relationships between them but not on a common ontology Yet there has to be a mechanism for sequentially converting from one to another.

What we need to do is to define a sharable set of common objects with known associable processes. (The process of identifyin the commonality they share is fundamentally the difference between a theory and a practice.) To do this we need to divorce local nomenclature from ontological nomenclature, and local processes from commonly shared processes. We need to know that this set of mathematical operations are performed in the context of actuarial science, this set in the context of statistical analysis, and this set in the context of set theory.

> Ok to refine the context as follows : "field in which a set of people (call
> it a community or not) use the same ontology to deal with the same
> process". 

>From the above business related arument I would claim the following to be more accurate:
 "The field in which they can agree on the processes that can be applied to a set of named terms that share a common definition". (Its the definition that counts, not the name that is applied to it.)

> Note that the context does not necessarily change the underlying ontology,
> but can change the order in which items in the ontology are considered
> relevant.
> 
> <definition problem>
> "The order in which items are considered relevant"
> Suppose you mean by that the association architecture.
> I thought that was considered internal to ontology : what you mean by one
> term in one context is linked to what you mean by associated terms, and the
> way you associate them. What I understand is changing context does not
> necessarily change the vocabulary, but the extension of terms semantics and
> their eventual hierarchy, as you point out very accurately with engines and
> cars.
> </definition problem>

Not sure what you mean by the term "association architecture". What is important to me is that there are multiple possible routes to reach the same concept, and that on some of those routes the same set of ancestors can appear in different orders. I consider this to be external to the ontology because of the possibility of reordering, which is not inherent in most ontologies.

> <definition problem>
> Of course, but global trading is itself a context ;-)

Yes, but it is itself a set of processes, as shown above, each of which is its own context.

> Don't get me wrong. From a technical viewpoint, standard terminology is
> wonderful and I'm always amazed by the tremendous amount of work done in
> this field, permitting to communicate as we do today. What I am up to is
> more in the "education-information-opinion context" than in the
> "trade-business context". 

Even in a information oriented field such as education or politics (which is just a matter of opinion!) the context in which you use the term can affect its perceived meaning. For instance the term "mathematics teacher" has a different perception to someone in the Ministry of Education from that of someone in the Treasury :-) The processes involved are different in each case. Try asking someone in each of these departments to draw up an ontology that applies to mathematics teachers. Maybe they would come up with:
 
Education/Secondary/Sciences/Mathmatics/Teacher
and
PublicEmployee/PrefecturalAppointment/Level13/Teaching/Mathematics

Same object, same meaning of end term, different contexts in which to find the object/meaning. Totally different ontologies ;-(

>Saying there is no universal set of concepts
> through which analyze and organize all our thoughts and "views of the
> world" is not necessarily in contradiction with a global agreement on
> technical standards to communicate with.
> </definition problem>

Ah, now we come to the real key - how do we communicate the relationships between objects/things/occurrrences/classes/concepts/topics and the contexts in which they are used. Topic maps allow you to identify concepts and topics and differentiate them from the occurrences of things that represent them. They also allow for the identification of the relationships between them in a way that allows different sets of associations to be assigned to different user communities. What they do not allow us to do is to identify the sequence of associations that leads to the need for a particular topic. (They have no concept of class/subclass or of precedence.)

> One of my main concerns in that debate is how to find safeguards against
> technical standards imposing "thought standards". We know pretty well that
> our use of specific technical tools shapes in some way our "view of the
> world". Like it or not, my daily use of Microsoft products shapes somehow
> the way I think, and puts me in the "MS users community" :(   ...  which
> does not mean I share all of Bill Gates ontology (I've good reasons to
> think it anyway)

We are all shaped by the thought standards (or, in the case of newspapers, "lack of standards") that surround us. The trick is to divorce the thought patterns from the information patterns. Lateral thinking is key here. It is postulated on the idea that there is no known association to start with, but that applying a known association to a currently unconnected pair of known concepts pays dividends. So given two topics, which set of the associations we have agreed are useful to our community can be applied to connect these two topics?

Context sits above ontology, not within it. It acts as a filter to the ontology. It ca be used used to select topics based on their scopes rather than their ancestory. It can also be used to identify facets that provide user dependent views on a topic map. Thats why <number scope="statistics"> and <number scope="arithmetic"> will continue to be needed for occurrences in topic maps about numerology :-)

Martin