Hi all, Dan (Brickley) pointed me at these discussions on DOLCE.
Well, actually I only mentioned BFO. But you are
correct in surmising that I had DOLCE partly in
mind.
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.
Yes, I know you can be 'neutral' in DOLCE. But
this isn't using DOLCE correctly, as it was meant
to be used. And I was intending to make a
stronger point: not just that one can be
continuant/occurrent neutral, but that having the
distinction in a high-level ontology at all is
actively harmful. The rest of your message makes
my main point for me.
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.
If only everyone else had your laissez-faire attitude.
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>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.
That sounds interesting, indeed. Can you point to more on this topic?
(2) Roles and occurrents
Roles, as they are modelled in DOLCE-Lite-Plus
(<http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/DLP_397.owl>http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/DLP_397.owl)
and in
DOLCE-Ultralite (<http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/DUL.owl>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.
But this is disingenuous. Maybe it was just a
terminological choice when you made it, but now
its in the foundational ontology it has the force
of case law. It is virtually impossible for a
user to deny it: if he or she tries to, all kinds
of tools will give error messages, etc.. It
really isn't possible to ignore the distinction
under these circumstances. One has to be VERY
careful when writing things that will get set
into stone in a 'standard'.
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.
A perfect illustration of my point. Why should
anyone have to understand and remember all this,
all these complicated distinctions about what
goes with what but not with what other? What USE
is any of this stuff? What would be lost if it
were all simply swept away?
There are entities that occupy space and last for
a time. One can use a single, uniform, set of
concepts to refer to the spatial and temporal
relations between such things, and their
mereology and if necessary their geometry and
topology, simply *because* they occupy space and
time. There is no need to pay attention to all
this clutter of terminological distinctions.
Now, of course, there are distinctions to be
made: not all spatiotemporal things are in the
same category. But they are all *contained in
space and time* in the same way, which is why
(you wanted a rationale, right?) any of their
properties or relations *which arise from or
refer to the nature of this containment* can be
described in one way, and used for all of them.
Which simplifies things enormously and means that
busy, practical biologists don't have to keep
wondering whether the Krebs cycle or a computer
program is a continuant or an occurrent. And
then, once that distinction goes away, all these
other distinctions go away as well.
In general, the class Concept is used to talk of
notions that are used to classify any entity at
some time for some reason.
Thats a nice definition. I presume it is OK to
parse it as "...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
How do you get that from the usual conditions on
continuants? How do contexts come into the
picture? Surely events have contexts too, no?
; 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"
I would suggest that anything that you can refer
to using a name is an "entity" of some kind.
: who cares about Brentano's theology (poor guy,
however, did he make anything bad to your
ancestors? :)).
No :-) I got fed up having Barry cite him at me
every time we argued, so I went and checked out
where his ideas really came from. In fact
Brentano is one of the main sources for the
'continuant' notion: both Barry and Peter Simons
explicitly acknowledge him. It does not come from
robust Western linguistic common sense, as you
imply above and many people assume. (It is in
fact a *very* peculiar notion.) And Brentano
liked the idea because he was absolutely sure
that he had a soul, and that souls had to be
continuants for basically theological reasons.
Makes you just love philosophy, finding out
things like this.
OK, enough from me on this on this topic on this
email list. I promised not to debate this stuff
here. So Aldo, you get the last word, if you want
it.
Pat
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,
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]&In-Reply-To=%253Cp06230907c29c6cae1e1a%40%5B10.100.0.39%5D%253E&References=%253Cp06230907c29c6cae1e1a%40%5B10.100.0.39%5D%253E>[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
Senior Researcher
Laboratory for Applied Ontology
Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technology
National Research Council (ISTC-CNR)
Via Nomentana 56, 00161, Roma, Italy
Tel: +390644161535
Fax: +390644161513
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skype aldogangemi
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