New paths for subject identity? RE: [topicmapmail] Making ontologies : RDF vs TM

[jackpark@thinkalong.com]

I like this thread.  Way down below, Murray is seen to have
stated: "Nothing has or is just one subject".

But, we have come to accept that there is a "one subject:
one topic" correspondence, driving the urge to merge.

How to reconcile, if, indeed, reconcilliation is necessary,
a perceived tension between what Murray says and what we
accept as a central dogma of topic mapping?  Consider a
shoe, maybe a particular shoe. Yup. That shoe constitutes
the concept implied by "nothing" (interpreted to mean: "no
thing" or "no concept"). But, there is a plethora of
subjects that can be raised around that shoe (subject),
thus, associations. So, on the hunch that Murray states a
fundamental truth, that no concept can have or be just one
subject (not sure I care much for that wording), that,
reworded, any concept can be associated with many subjects,
then, where's the beef?

Bernard raises this quotation in the context of a
fundamental argument that (and this is my interpretation of
what Bernard is doing; your mileage may vary), the XTM use
of a PSI might be flawed because subjectness is thought to
be contextually sensitive. Ok. My interpretation could be
way off base here; I'm trying sensemaking in a really
complex domain using two-dimensional thought processes.
Ignoring that possibility and forging ahead, I don't see
any beef. One topic, one subject. Issue is identity.

Issue is identity, and that's where I think that the Steve
Newcomb approach to disclosure of identity rules starts to
make sense. Yup. Identity really is context sensitive, and,
again, my interpretation at work here, the TMRM permits the
derivation of identity through scoped assertions, as
addressed in the required disclosures. Maybe there's a
better way to accomplish the implementation of
context-sensitive identification of subjects, or at least,
maybe there's a different way. But, the TMRM, in my view,
seems to want to address this particular issue directly.

Jack

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 15:17:22 +0200
 "Bernard Vatant" <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com> wrote:
>
>Murray
>
>> ... Early libraries tried to create a whole
>> bunch of categories, then assign each book to a
>category. It was
>> rather quickly discovered that these fixed categories
>didn't work
>> very well for the real world, that almost nothing is
>*about* a
>> single subject, that the whole idea of "about" is very
>context-based.
>
>Very much agreed ...
>
>> So when in computing, say as in RDF, we see "rdf:about",
>or in Topic
>> Maps we see "subjectIndicatorRef", we should be very
>suspicious, or
>> at least very careful. Nothing has or is just one
>subject. The
>> statement of subject-hood is contextual.
>
>Ditto. Along those lines, I've been questioning lately
>here in an exchange with Lars
>Marius the "absolute" relevancy of subject indicators, IOW
>what are the relevant contexts
>in which subject indicators can/should be used for
>identification?
>See
>http://www.infoloom.com/pipermail/topicmapmail/2004q4/006277.html
>
>Identity in context, or identification as a process, are
>also the current lines of thought
>at
>http://universimmedia.blogspot.com/
>that I set two months ago to gather reflection about
>identification issues (independently
>of any specific technology).
>
>> This is what I mean when the whole idea of identity has
>become a
>> problem in its own right. If you Google on "nicola
>guarino identity"
>> you'll find a number of important documents [1][2] on
>the subject,
>> written by one of the few people in the field I trust on
>this topic.
>
>I would also quote Pat Hayes here, with whom quite a while
>ago, towards the end of the OWL
>standardization process, I had some private exchanges
>where he expressed that the identity
>issue was a core question and "sadly overlooked" (by
>RDF-OWL specification among others).
>
>> And then I'm still not sure he's got it right. It's a
>really tough
>> epistemological problem. I don't know that it's ideally
>solvable,
>> perhaps only pragmatically (and I also mean
>Pragmatically) solvable.
>> The problem is again, what to do about context? It's
>recursive.
>
>Yes. If identification needs a context, then how do you
>*identify the context*? Jack Park
>pushed to me lately some authors who go as far as to say
>that, in general, the fact that
>two things are identical (read, the identity of a subject)
>is formally undecidable.
>http://universimmedia.blogspot.com/2004/10/more-things-change-more-they-are-same.html
>
>If we follow those tracks, yes, identity can only be
>established on a pragmatic basis. IOW
>there are effective ways to agree on process of
>identification in a given context, but no
>universal way to assert the identity of something (or
>someone). For example, there are
>many contexts in which I can be identified by various
>identifiers and protocols (email
>address, phone number, credit card number, welfare number,
>passport number ...) but I
>figure that none of those, or any other, can pretend to
>carry "my identity" (not even my
>fully decrypted DNA) in *any context*.
>
><skip/>
>
>> So the only way I can see to deal with this is to simply
>stop categorizing,
>> stop defining, and begin to look at processes of
>categorizing, processes
>> of defining. It's the processes that we need to focus
>on.
>
>This has been the succesful approach of Quantum Mechanics
>in Physics: be agnostic about
>the existence of entities out there in the physical world,
>focus on measure protocols.
>That's why I've been much impressed by the approach
>developed lately here by Lutz on
>"Subject Identity Measure". See the identification
>protocols the same way as measure
>protocols in certainly the way forward.
>
>Unfortunately no time now to comment further on ...
>
>Cheers
>
>**********************************************************************************
>
>Bernard Vatant
>Senior Consultant
>Knowledge Engineering
>bernard.vatant@mondeca.com
>
>"Making Sense of Content" :  http://www.mondeca.com
>"Everything is a Subject" :
> http://universimmedia.blogspot.com
>
>**********************************************************************************
>
>
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