[topicmapmail] basics II - Inheritance in Topic Maps

[Murray Altheim]

Robert Barta wrote:
[...]
> Murray,
> 
> As strange as it may sound, I can share you sentiments regarding an
> "official" language. In fact, for relational models there are a few,
> albeit quite similar schema languages, for XML you have a zoo - and
> that will remain, it seems to me. There is no indication that for
> ontologies this will be different.

Honestly, it doesn't sound so odd. As you may know, my research lately
has been as deep into this field as time has allowed, and we probably
share the belief that there is no pure, underlying view of reality
that would allow a single model to suffice. I've been recently reading
a little of Robert Brandom ("Articulating Reasons"), and I agree with
his basic pragmatic premise that it is language that defines thinking,
not the other way around (though they are of course inextricably
linked). By this reasoning, there may be as many ontological expressions
as there are people; by definition this would seem to be the case.

> The reason I see in favor of standardized languages is that the TM
> paradigm without an ontology definition language (and without a query
> language) seems incomplete to me: For all the applications I have
> written I had this "wouldn't it be nice" feeling.

Yes, absent something one must create it. I've had to do that for
my own work.

>>I'd be keen on hearing your thoughts on what might constitute some
>>sort of meta-language that *might* be relatively agnostic.
> 
> I assume that with 'meta-ontology language' you mean a language which
> allows to define ontologies. Yes, this is what AsTMa! (and others)
> tries to do.
> 
> I am not sure whether this can be defined _without_ any underlying
> model. What we try here is to use a model which is rather close to
> Steve N's reference model, although streamlined a bit. So I plan to
> define the language semantics fully in terms of a Topic Map model and
> not some other model theory. This is as agnostic as my imagination
> goes.

I agree that there must be some level of ontological commitment, but
perhaps it could be lightweight enough, or simple enough, or so
soundly based as to not raise eyebrows. While skeptical of this at
its base, I still need it. I'll have to look again at AsTMa!  I'm
particularly interested in expressing my ontologies in XTM syntax,
which (to my way of thinking) would mean that the "ontology toolkit"
would be delivered as a collection of PSI sets/modules and a tutorial
on how to use them in constructing ontologies. I will be doing this
as part of my Ph.D. work.

Murray

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

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