[topicmapmail] Making ontologies : RDF vs TM
Carlo Moneti
cmoneti@twcny.rr.com
Fri, 22 Oct 2004 12:21:36 -0400
On 2004.10.21 22:05 Murray Altheim wrote:
[~17th paragraph]
> Topics don't exist, except as the confluence of a whole lot of
> Associations.
Excellent! My thinking lately is that the most intuitive (and possibly
powerful) form of knowledge representation may be to mimic the way
knowledge is represented in the brain. The popular concept of memory as a
"filing cabinet" where experiences are "stored" has become meaningless to
me. I suspect that "memory" is not a special case of brain function, and
that all identifiable entities we conceive of in our mind are a confluence
of associations in the neural network of the brain.
[~ 34th paragraph]
> Baffles me how you can claim to be representing something you
> can't really define.
Perhaps "how to represent" and "how to define" are not fundamentally
different concepts?
Cheers,
Carlo Moneti
http://arsteca.net
On 2004.10.21 22:05 Murray Altheim wrote:
> Dr. Agnes Mühlmeyer-Mentzel wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> thank you for answering, Murray. I agree with you on what you have
>> written about ontologies and
>> communication.
>>
>> I have some questions to specific parts of your message. As I'm a
>> beginner in thinking about ontologies I have a lot of questions. Murray
>> Altheim wrote:
>>
>>> Dr. Agnes Mühlmeyer-Mentzel wrote:
> [...]
>>>>> But rather than
>>>>> discuss what ontology *is* (since I'm on very thin ice anyway),
>>>>> perhaps we should first ask what the problem is that ontology is
>>>>> suggested as a solution for.
>>
>> In my opinion, ontologies (in the scope of internet) are expected to
>> support communication (in the space of internet).
>
> Certainly, if we are confining ourselves to web-based or web-targeted
> ontologies. But of course the field of Knowledge Representation spans
> a much wider area and has a much longer history. When it emerged from
> a combination of philosophy, cognitive science, computer science, and
> other fields is a matter of some speculation, but it's at least been
> around within the field of computing since the 1960's beginnings of
> Artificial Intelligence.
>
> But perhaps I'm making your reply more complicated than you intended
> it. Another way I can see this is as the distinction between the
> concept of "ontology" within philosophy and "ontology" within computing,
> as they are certainly related but also two different beasts.
>
>>>>> [E.g., will creating a large structure
>>>>> of fixed categories and then placing everything into those categories
>>>>> work?
>>>>
>>>> Hasn't this actually turned into a problem in its own right?]
>>
>> Might you put the problem you are thinking on in concrete terms?
>
> Perhaps by way of example. 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.
> 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.
>
> 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.
> 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.
>
>>>> May be, building categories and ontologies don't solve a problem in an
>>>> optimal manner.
>>>> The question is, do I have a choice?
>>>
>>> You certainly have a choice both in the philosophical/epistemological
>>> approach you take, and in the actual tools/implementation. Certain
>>> epistemologies (or lack thereof) lead one down cul de sacs, certain
>>> tools have built-in deficiencies (both epistemologically and
>>> practically,
>>> perhaps because these are linked).
>>
>> I'm not a philosopher. What form of philosophical approach you are
>> thinking on? Is it possible to have an approach without any terminology,
>> without categories, without definitions?
>
> I'm still working on this one, so I'm not claiming any answer here. But
> my feeling is that we shouldn't be looking for a set of fixed categories
> but rather a particular *approach* to modeling.
>
> I say this because it's patently obvious from a simple look at reality
> (rather than say, mathematics) that fixed categories simply don't exist
> except in the most simplistic of views, and definitions are exactly
> like categories, i.e., they too are contextual, many-layered, recursive.
>
> 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. I think this
> is the same thing neuroscience is coming to in trying to understand the
> human brain: that the brain is not composed of a bunch of Topics, it is
> composed of a bunch of Associations. That Topics don't exist, except as
> the confluence of a whole lot of Associations. (I use Topic Map termino-
> logy here because I am also emphasizing that I think we can still use
> Topic Map technology to do information or "knowledge" modeling; we just
> need to alter our approach a bit when talking about subject identity.)
>
> The problem is that almost the entirety of western culture is built
> upon thousands of years of thinking about things as subjects, as
> categories, as identifiable "types", when I believe reality is telling
> us otherwise. If you look into the Lao Tse, written around 300 BCE, you
> find an admonishment to avoid such hard and fast rules, such easy
> categorizations. We want life to be simple, and the western approach
> was to try to come up with a Complete Set of Categories. The eastern
> approach was to look at How Things Flow. The difference between the
> CCC and HTW approaches to life only began to meld together in the
> western intellectual community (if we ignore the wealth of the Ottomans)
> in the late 19th to early 20th century with the translation of some
> of the eastern classics by intellectual adventurers like Herbert Giles,
> James Legge, Arthur Waley and Richard Wilhelm. By the 1950's it had
> thoroughly infected western thought, such that I think the great
> flourish of the arts and sciences in the latter half of the last
> century owes a great deal to this melding. It transformed us. The
> industrial revolution brought us "progress", but the East brought
> us to a new way of understanding, which is a much greater form of
> progress.
>
>>> I've long advocated looking to fields that have demonstrable expertise
>>> in categories and taxonomies, such as library sciences. I note that
>>> few if any computer-based ontology systems have a built-in
>>> classification
>>> system, such that trying to navigate through them is usually difficult.
>>
>> I'm interested in your experiences, even if they were disappointing.
>> What makes it difficult?
>
> Well, as an example, try browsing the Cyc ontology [3]. You're only
> looking
> at a very small of the upper and middle ontology, and already it becomes
> a complete mess (e.g., [4]). The lower ontology is not even listed, and
> that's where things get really complicated, just like real life. Not that
> the Cyc model is necessarily bad, it just becomes impossible to navigate.
>
> Compare Cyc with a library card catalog system, which is dealing with
> many orders of magnitude more objects to categorize. Librarians are our
> information experts, not computer scientists. To be fair, Cyc and a
> library are doing two different things, and in fact Cyc is taking on
> that big task I mentioned above of trying to map the relationships
> between things, which the library is not tackling.
>
>>>> Building categories and ontologies is an effort to transform knowledge
>>>> into linguistic forms. Linguistic forms may be weak, but they are our
>>>> most important forms for interacting and sometimes the only ones.
>>
>>> You must note that many scientists, of both the "hard" (e.g., physics)
>>> and "soft" (e.g., ethics) varieties, though particularly the former,
>>> believe that what they're discovering is a closer approximation to
>>> some platonic ideal, some better representation of reality than that
>>> of the last generation of scientists. They don't look at this as a
>>> form of communication or inter-communication.
>>
>> I agree on that, but only partly. Are categorization and making
>> ontologies the problem or is the misusage of categorization and
>> ontologies the problem?
>
> My snide answer is "yes" (though this joke may not translate well
> for non-native speakers of English). As I said above, I think the
> problem is in the approach. Now, if one's approach is misguided,
> any usage will be a misusage.
>
>> Or in addition to it: is the underlying problem the misusage of a
>> powerful appointment some scientists hold?
>> I think it's very important, to differentiate at this point.
>
> I'm not sure if I understand that question exactly. Though if I
> do understand you correctly, yes, this is the very aspect of
> science that Arthur Fine was talking about, about pulling the
> "hard" science down off of its pedestal and understanding it as
> being of the same kind of inquiry as any other.
>
>>>> The problems of ontologies are the problems of language. We have to
>>>> solve them by communicating and interacting.
>>>
>>> Yes, and one of the points I will be making fairly strong in my own
>>> thesis is that ontologies are a form of communication, they are a way
>>> of stating: "this is what *I* believe." They are not, and I repeat,
>>> not expressions of universal, platonic reality. This is a mistake I
>>> see commonly repeated. I had dinner with Doug Lenat, inventor of the
>>> Cyc ontology, and was pleased to hear him say that Cyc was not such
>>> an expression, that it was, in effect, "Doug's Ontology" (now, more
>>> correctly, "Cycorp's Ontology").
>>>
>>> I think that it's important to consider the development of computer-
>>> based ontologies as a means of communicating ideas about our
>>> understanding of reality, of a specific domain. And that when we
>>> allow others to see that ontology, they understand it as something
>>> we are *saying*, not an expression of the universal. Now, ontologies
>>> can and are being developed by cooperative groups, consortia, etc.,
>>> and these are considered agreements between people.
>>
>> I agree on that. As it seems there is a competitive situation between
>> those two
>> approaches, the idea of an universal ontologie and the idea of a
>> communicated ontologie. I am unacquainted with the idea of an universal
>> ontologie, but I must admit not to know much about it.
>
> If you can locate a copy of John Sowa's "Knowledge Representation",
> it begins on the front cover with the 13th century's Tree or Porphyry.
> Sowa's a funny chap, as while he has an amazingly encyclopedic
> understanding of the field, with a grasp of its history that is
> remarkable, he does (to me at least) seem very bound to the ideas
> of the Greeks. I think he tends to declaim when I say this, but in
> reading his two books I can't help but see him as a proponent of a
> well-categorized world. And while I can't find the quote, he wrote
> into one of the lists we are both on that he thought that the
> problems of KR are solvable with just a better understanding, that
> we just hadn't cracked it yet.
>
> My feeling is that it isn't crackable, that we'll never have any
> kind of universal ontology because there are almost no shared
> universals amongst all people. People don't like to hear that,
> and the field of KR ignores the problem and just moves on with
> finding a solution. Baffles me how you can claim to be representing
> something you can't really define.
>
>> But beside of that competitive situation I'm convinced that there is
>> plenty of work to achieve a communication with a better understanding.
>
> Yes, and I think that a greater focus on the aspects of this as a
> form of communication will lead to much greater understanding,
> moving away from the mechanistic to the humanistic. This is to
> my understanding what people like Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom,
> and Jurgen Habermas are all about. Rorty seems to be screaming
> it in books like "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature."
>
>> To come back to the specific subject: Ontologies and Knowledge in
>> science:
>> For a long period of time science has been subdivided into many many
>> disciplines. Every discipline has developed its categorization and
>> terminology and use everyday words in a specific way.
>> Nowadays the scientific community begin to stress the inter-disciplinary
>> approach and the possibilities of the internet are forcing this
>> approach. As there are a lot of terms that are used in different ways
>> the interdisciplinary approach can only become fruitful, when scientists
>> are willing to communicate about this. That is an arduous challenge.
>
> Absolutely. And any technology that allows people to intercommunicate
> between these various (and I might add: overlapping) communities, whilst
> maintaining the necessary context and understanding with regard to
> context-of-discussion, domain-of-discussion, time-of-discussion, etc.
> we may see the beginnings of fully context-preserving communication. I
> think Topic Maps are a technology capable of doing this.
>
> So throw out that dictionary and begin to use one that maps all known
> *usages* of a term rather than a fixed definition. A nightmare? No,
> the releasing from a straightjacket, the pulling off of blinders, at
> the same time as the words are still shown within their contextual
> anchorings, with all the concomitant richness, muddiness and flavour.
>
>> Here an example:
>>
>> We have had a interdisciplinary panel discussion about "emotion".
>> Sixteen scientists of six disciplines were discussing (at the end:
>> combatting). At the end a woman of the audience asked: "Are you sure,
>> you are speaking about the same subject?"
>
> Heh. I would be hard pressed to understand under what circumstances
> sixteen scientists from six disciplines could possibly be intelligently
> discussing emotion, without emotion. But yes, this perfectly illustrates
> what we've been talking about.
>
> [Sorry about the delay in getting back to you. I've been particularly
> behind schedule on things here, and I also was dealing with a family
> illness that took my attention away from everything else. One heart
> bypass surgery later, things are happily improving daily...]
>
> Murray
>
> [1]
> http://www.sigmod.org/sigmod/dblp/db/indices/a-tree/g/Guarino:Nicola.html
> [2] Guarino, Nicola and Chris Welty. In press. Identity and Subsumption
> http://www.cs.vassar.edu/faculty/welty/papers/
> [3] Cyc Reference
> http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/vocab/vocab-toc.html
> [4] objectOfPossessionTransfer
>
> http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/vocab/financial-vocab.html#objectOfPossessionTransfer
> ......................................................................
> Murray Altheim http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
> Knowledge Media Institute
> The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK .
>
> A schoolteacher at a Bush event was on her way to the bathroom when
> she was stopped by a volunteer and told she wasn't welcome. The
> volunteer pointed to her T-shirt and said it was 'obscene'. She and
> her two friends (also wearing the same shirts) were escorted out by
> police officers and threatened with arrest if they did not comply.
>
> The T-Shirts read: 'Protect Our Civil Liberties'"
>
> Shutting Them Up
>
> http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004_10_17_dneiwert_archive.html#109830472470609571
>
> Dismantling Democracy
>
> http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004_10_17_dneiwert_archive.html#109830622308006215
> _______________________________________________
> topicmapmail mailing list
> topicmapmail@infoloom.com
> http://www.infoloom.com/mailman/listinfo/topicmapmail