[topicmapmail] Fuzzy Stuff

[Jon Awbrey]

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Subj:  Re: FYI
Date:  Sat, 19 Aug 2000 00:18:06 -0400
From:  Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
  To:  Stand Up Ontology <standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>

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Christopher A. Welty wrote:
> 
> "Clearer Fuzzy Product Quests"
> Interactive Week (08/07/00) Vol. 7, No. 31, P. 18; Cleary, Mike
> 
> A National Retail Federation (NRF) project might soon allow consumers
> to use common-sense descriptors when searching the Internet for desired
> products, making it easier to find a "fuzzy" sweater or "plush" towel.
> The NRF is designing a product attribute system (PAS), more simply
> described as a shared language.  XML tags would be attached to the
> product descriptions in company databases' product listings.
> The PAS would likely be owned and controlled by the NRF.

Jon Awbrey writes:

Be the first in your neigborhood to PUN, PAS, & KIK
the uniformly consinuous Epsilon-NRF-Ball!

Strangely enough, there is a funny sort of relationship between
ontological relativity (multi-perspectives? poly-ontologies?),
fuzzy sets, and triadic relations, perhaps (I am still guessing)
of the sort that John Sowa had in mind.

Consider a fuzzy set as a triadic relation of the form x €^r S
among an element x, a degree of membership r, and a set S.
You may, of course, substitute "concept" for "set" if you
prefer that way of thinking about things.

Ask yourself:  Where do these assigned degrees of membership come from?
Imagine that they come from averaging the results of many judges binary
{0, 1} = {out, in} decisions.

Now consider the more fundamental triadic relation from which this
data is derived, the relation of the form x €_j S that exists among
an element x, an interpreter (judge, observer, user) j, and a set S.

If we use these sorts of relations as the basic formal structures of
our representation, then there is enough elbow room, I am guessing,
to have all of our cakes and to eat them too.  In other words, if
we consider JS's questions ("World's Largest Individual Organism",
17 Aug 2000 08:56 EDT):

| Do you represent a chair as a construction of wood and metal?
| Do you represent it as an enormous buzz of interacting atoms?
| Do you represent it as an object for human beings to sit on
| without considering the details of its construction?
|
| John Sowa (JS): http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00608.html

Then it becomes possible to give them the Joycean answer:

Yes. Yes. Yes.

The not so Joyce-ful task is to keep each view parameterized by the
community of interpretation that finds it compelling, interesting,
practical, useful, or "to their purpose" at a given moment, and
to figure out how to maintain a not-too-chaotic form and medium
of communication among these diverse communities.

Yes? No? Indifferent?

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