Hi all, Dan (Brickley) pointed me at these discussions on DOLCE. I
tend to avoid too many emails and forums on foundational ontologies,
in favor of constructive work, but this mailing list seems oriented
at doing real things, then I am eager to come back to my old home in
medical ontologies :)
Some comments and recap on the current status of DOLCE and its
utility for medical ontologies.
(1) Continuant vs. Occurrent
Pat, we already had this discussion at least two times; the last one
was very detailed and we (apparently) agreed on the fact that we
might be free to adopt the distinction or not, even in DOLCE: if you
want to stay neutral, just use Entity or SpatioTemporalEntity. The
distinction can be useful in some domains that share a common sense,
linguistic (Western-variety) intuition, but I will not fight for it,
as for any other.
The point of DOLCE and related ontologies is having explicit
*rationales* to justify modelling choices, not to dictate how people
should think or model the world. As a matter of fact, in the context
of the NeOn project (http://www.neon-project.org), we are moving to a
"design pattern" approach to ontology reuse, which will probably
change the way foundational or reference ontologies should be used or
thought about.
(2) Roles and occurrents
Roles, as they are modelled in DOLCE-Lite-Plus (http://www.loa-cnr.it/
ontologies/DLP_397.owl) and in DOLCE-Ultralite (http://www.loa-cnr.it/
ontologies/DUL.owl), are applied to continuants, but this is just a
terminological choice that adheres to the usual intuition of roles
played by agents, substances, etc.
However, a similar intuition is provided for occurrents by the
classes Course and Task in DOLCE-Lite-Plus and by the classes
EventStructure and Task in DOLCE-Ultralite. In general, the class
Concept is used to talk of notions that are used to classify any
entity at some time for some reason. If you want to use Evidence as a
role for (the result, execution of) an experiment, then you can use
EventStructure or directly Concept. The distinction, where needed,
makes sense: roles of occurrents have usually a richer structure than
roles of continuants, because they are used to suggest how events and
their temporal structure should be interpreted in some context; in
order to be an evidence, the result of an experiment should be
obtained in a certain way, e.g. with explicit methods and control
conditions.
Pat, notice that in DOLCE-Ultralite you can introduce experiment
results as entities, classified by an "EvidenceConcept": who cares
about Brentano's theology (poor guy, however, did he make anything
bad to your ancestors? :)).
Something else on another thread about DOLCE and solutions for
readability of horrible foundational terms.
Cheers
Aldo
>On Jun 12, 2007, at 3:53 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>>
>>Hi Waclaw,
>>
>>>Matthias, if you look carefully at BFO, you'll see that roles are
>>>entities. This means that evidences, as roles, are entities.
>>
>>Of course. I just wanted to differentiate that an experiment is not
>>an instance of any class called 'evidence' (in other words, an
>>experiment 'is not' evidence). Instead, it should be associated
>>with an 'evidence-role'.
>
>The only problem with this is that roles inhere in continuants
>rather than in occurrents. One way around this is not to say that
>evidence is an experiment, but rather the results of an experiment.
If I may interject, the fact that you need to find a way 'around'
this illustrates what I have long found to be the case, that the
continuant/occurrent distinction, and the resulting artificial
restrictions that it places upon what one is allowed to say, is more
harm than it is worth. One can take any ontology (such as BFO) that
is based up on it and simply erase the distinction (and all its
consequent distinctions) and nothing is thereby lost, only a
simplification achieved and the need for artificial work-arounds
diminished. It is in any case based on very debatable (and indeed
debated) philosophical assumptions, arising chiefly from
ordinary-language philosophy (and Brentano's theology) than from
anything scientific. It carves nature at language's joints rather
than nature's joints.
Pat Hayes
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Aldo Gangemi
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Laboratory for Applied Ontology
Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technology
National Research Council (ISTC-CNR)
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