[topicmapmail] Superclass-subclass indentation in the Omnigat or

[Murray Altheim]

Dichev, Christo wrote:

> I was also tempted to add few comments regarding the context.
> 
> The notion of context is widely studied in different areas of AI.
> However it became a popular issue only in the late 1980s, when
> J. McCarthy proposed to formalise context as a possible solution
> to the problem of generality.
> 
> In the same years, D. Lenat and R. Guha introduced an explicit
> mechanism of contexts in the CYC common sense knowledge base. Guha
> proposed a logic of context in his Ph.D. dissertation. In this work,
> several and important concepts (such as the formula Ist(c,p), lifting,
> entering and exiting contexts).


Hmm. It seems somewhat ironic then that Cyc is sometimes talked
about as if it were a universal ontology, something that essentially
coerces everyone into the same context in order to communicate. Now
on talking to Doug Lenat I don't believe that's his intention, but
any sort of "universal" ontology has that effect. IOW, I simply
don't believe in "common sense", that we all universally share some
common notion of reality. Sanity is overrated.


> F. Giunchiglia was the first to shift the focus explicitly
> from context to contextual reasoning. His main motivation was the
> problem of locality, namely the problem of modelling reasoning which
> uses only a subset of what reasoners actually know about the world.
> 
> A common theme in KR and NL is the idea that context acts as a filler
> of missing parts and that it simplifies and speeds up inference, giving
> up its precision and/or correctness.
> 
> I personally believe that the notion of context has important pragmatic
> aspect: to make  reasoning systems which are never permanently stuck
> with the concepts they use at a given time, because they can always
> transcend the context they are in. Such a capability would allow the
> designer of a reasoning system to include only such phenomena that
> are required for the system's immediate purpose.


This I'm assuming is similar to some of the work of the Australian
researches such as Paul Compton and Debbie Richards, and (apparently)
at odds with much of the research done here at KMi, which tends to
favour predeveloped ontologies over ad hoc ones. Since my focus is
on authoring by non-knowledge engineers, I'm a bit stuck in the middle.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                  <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK

            If you're the first person in a new territory,
            you're likely to get shot at.
                                                     -- ma