[Thanks to Jack Park for graciously allowing me the opportunity to lurk]
I didn't have time to read Goguen's paper (on a low bandwidth modem at the
moment), so I apologise if this just reiterates things he's written.
I'm personally inclined to think of everything we attach a noun label to as
being a 'bag o' properties' at some lower level and from some perspective.
Some of those properties might be a position on a human-defined scale, e.g.
temperature, with say removing heat resulting in a lower temperature and the
relative term 'colder'. Some might be other noun labels, and so on down to
the pits.
It then becomes a matter of whether a state transition is large enough (in
terms of lower level property +s and -s) to cross a semantic boundary at the
level of discourse in operation and according to what perspective on the
'bag o' properties' is being taken.
Or something like that.
Hard stuff to put into a computer, though.
Peter
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Armstrong [mailto:eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com]
Sent: 03 April 2001 01:23
To: unrev-II@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [unrev-II] Fwd: Fw: Re: [PORT-L] Goguen's Semiotic
Morphisms
Matt Placek wrote:
>
> Many of the approaches to building ontologies seem to be fixated on a
> 'present-tense' description of the nature of things.
>
Great question. It strikes me that you are asking about how to model
a state change in the context of an ontology. Lets take water and
heat:
water + heat => hot water
water + sufficient heat => steam
water - heat => cold water
water - sufficient heat => ice
Hmmm. That example introduces yet another issue: amountOf.
Simply adding heat to water does not predict which state
change occurs -- the result depends on the previous state
and the amount of heat.
But leaving the issues of quantity aside, for the moment,
your question revolved around a simpler state change:
cow + slaughter => food
Here there is time-based complexity, because once the
slaughter association occurs, the cow object ceases to
exist and the food object comes into being!
One way to model that in an ontology might be to come
up with a single thing that is BOTH a cow and food.
Let's call it "bag o'protein".
We might now be able to model "bag o'protein" has
having one or more states (cow or food), and model
the transitions from one state to the next.
On the other hand, using an ontology to do that modeling
is probably the wrong tool for the job. But it sure as
heck is an interesting question! (I look forward to other
responses.)
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Apr 03 2001 - 01:52:45 PDT