Monday, February 20, 2006
Generative Methodology Glass Bead Games
Note: we feel
that this communication covers the range of issues that face our society today
regarding the interoperability of Information Modeling standards, the frustrations
associated with the W3C standards in particular and specific operational
assumptions that many find unreasonable, and yet utilitarian (up to a
point) see à [184]
Communication from Azamat, Encyclopedic Intelligent Systems
Hi, Paul:
The issues of OWL, its rationales, consistency and veridical-ness (ie [1] ) as a SW standard, have been discussed on SUO forum with the active participation of John Sowa. And, as I remember, we both agreed on main points of its demerits.
The trouble with its developers is not that they neither hear nor listen to your comments, however useful, but they are organizing and reorganizing all sorts of research consortia and SW 'excellent networks' (which are really a sort of academic mafia). [2]
The aim, here in Europe, is just to stick to European Commission 6th Framework Programme research funds, promising whatever you want, but yielding rather poor ontological deliverables. The real concern is that, in my impressions left after short email exchanges with the former OWL WG chair, J. Hendler, they fail to grasp the fundamentality of the fault. [3]
Since you are long trying
to falsify such unjustified claims, I will restate a communication to the SUO
forum indicating the most harmful OWL confusion of misplacing set theory and
formal logic with the real world (ontology) modeling of web content.
The OWL project undoubtedly comes under a promising technological undertaking, but the course of action embarked on makes it a dubious venture, raising doubts about the whole enterprise.
Although there is no question about the technological enormity of the target pursued. This target is the meaningful processing of web content by machines. As now it is clear, the administrators running the World Wide Web Consortium rushed the matter by recommending the OWL standard as an ontology language standard. It is asserted, by the W3C, that the OWL standard is optimally fit for structuring the Web data, documents, and applications. [4]
Beside the well-knowing merits, the language has bad conceptual faults that make it falling short of a commercial use. [5]
First, any ontology formal language designed to formulate classes and their relationships has to include an axiomatic theory of real world relations, of all basic kinds and properties, both real and formal. [6]
This is not the case with the OWL standard. One has to remember that this standard was created as a better vocabulary than XML, RDF, RDF Schema for formal description of classes, individuals, and properties, like as cardinality, equality, and other formal characteristics.
The language is lacking many significant features of relations, both formal and real.
Above all, the relation of cause and effect is fatally missing. [7]
Such defects come from the approach used, purely set-theoretical and formal logical, while not distinguishing relationships from correlatives, and avoiding reduction to real relational properties.
For example: 'Being a parent' is merely a relational property, while 'parentage' (parenthood, but not the act or process of parenting) is a relation of parent to child.
The relational property of being a cause is just a monadic reduction of causality, the relation of cause to effect. These nuances can not be captured by the OWL construction, for reasons that need to be made clear.
So, instead of classes and relational properties, we have rather to speak of classes and their relationships as two sorts of distinct entities. [8]
Besides, it will make a poor language to use the class/property distinction, where all properties are reduced to relational properties as a substitute of the relations of classes. In fact, there are several sorts of property:
1. substantial (material, structural);
2. stative (qualitative, quantitative);
3. active (functional)
4. relational (causal, spatial, temporal) properties
All such properties of a substantial class (genus) are to be inherited as the properties of its species and individuals.
With such distinction, it makes a difference whether we just state that 'a class (a thing) have attributes (properties)' or that 'a thing has the properties to be a substance, to be in a state, to be acted or acting upon, and to be related to something else'.
The later is a universal ontological statement, while the former is a general logical proposition. That is, from one side, to build a formal ontology language, one may develop a set-theoretic (logical) ontology constructed as a formal logical system composed of its objects-primitives, classes, individuals, and properties, logical syntax (notation techniques, formation and transformation rules), and formal semantics (model theory), as the OWL is doing.
From the other side, one can develop a true ontological system involving as its primitives Entity or Thing and the kinds of entities or things along with fundamental definitions, axioms and real-world semantics seeking the understanding the web content in the complex universe of real things and relationships.
Any general theoretical model or conceptual scheme or description framework is built with some kinds of concepts, individuals, predicates, attributes, or relations. If the model represents the traits and features of the real world, its predicates represent real properties. In so far as the scheme describes formal objects, its predicates give description of formal properties, attributes, or predicates. As a consequence, there are two sorts of predicates: formal, logical attributes or real-valued, ontological predicates.
Failing to see such difference can result in another conceptual mess. Proposing a general conceptual scheme by using the class (object)/property (relation) distinction, the data type languages like OWL are missing the gist of the matter.
For such a formal data structure might not adequately represent the whole gamut of the world entities with their various interrelationships.
We must clearly differentiate between classes, properties, definitions as logical forms and entity types as ontological classes. Since the definition and class and property will always be in one of these thing types represented by the classes of ontological predicates and signified by the generic terms and expressions, such as thing, being or entity, substance or object, state, property or quality and quantity, change or action or process, and relation, as causality and time-space relations. Any meaningful statements or propositions are always about one or another of these types of entity, in two principal ways. If the same type of predicate is asserted of its kinds (a quantity predicated of magnitudes), it signifies its genus, a thing's essence.
On the other side, if one type of predicate is asserted of another type, as equality and inequality relations are predicated of quantity, sameness or difference relations, of substances, it signifies rather a property than an essence.
Thus, to construct a standard Web ontology language of quality incorporating the basic rules of reasoning about the world and its generic entities, we first need to formulate the integral entity framework supporting all the major classes and relations in the consolidated hierarchy of things.
And designing such a (machine processable) ontology language system requires a scientific inquiry into the world of substances, states, changes, and relations as the top level ontological predicates, instead of empty logical predicates of classes and properties. [9]
Azamat Abdoullaev
EIS
Encyclopedic Intelligent Systems LTD
[1] Conforming to fact: accurate, correct, exact, faithful, precise, right, rigorous, true, veracious. See CORRECT, HONEST, REAL, TRUE. 2. Consistently telling the truth: truthful, veracious. See TRUE.
[2] Comment from Paul Prueitt: I agree with this comment, and have asked for Congressional investigation concerning the collusion of government and industry in the production of “false claims”.
[3] Comment from Paul Prueitt:: In Professor Hendler’s case, it is not a failure to understand, in my informed opinion. Hendler’s problem is his ego driven re-enforcement of a narrow viewpoint – one that excludes alternatives such as the ones proposed by the Second School. This behavior is justified based on some specific concepts of “correctness” based on “practicalities”.
[4] Comment from Paul Prueitt:: This assertion is being challenged by recent development in converting OWL to RDBMS … and thus demonstrating that the OWL standard does not provide power beyond what would be available from SQL and Codd third normal form – if the design process was not considered. Stated another way, the claim that OWL is based on a open world assumption is a false claim. The proper claim may be that OWL can provide a type of design environment and that within this design environment weaken certain restriction common in SQL based systems regarding incomplete information or information not aligned with the database’s schema. However, the class of schema possible in OWL and in Codd-type relational databases is the same class.
[5] Comment from Paul Prueitt:: This critic of W3C has been made repeatedly by John Sowa.
[6] Comment from Paul Prueitt:: This is precisely the position of the second school of semantic science.
[7] Comment from Paul Prueitt:: The Rosen definition of entailment is required if one is to have a general ontological modeling paradigm that allows modeling everyday decisions by humans, and the modeling of complexity.
[8] Comment from Paul Prueitt: This is precisely the issue that I have been raising in the Protégé eforums. IN biology the taxonomy makes sense because there are causal entailments form the replicator function of genes. Memetics MIGHT ground “some” entailments to nested conceptual categories as expressed in social discourse. But the ontological assumption of nested categorization within the W3C standard is not justified by natural science.
[9] Comment from Paul Prueitt:: The Second School takes positions very close to yours in all cases.