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Hi Robert,
Depending on practical use cases people use binary or n-ary relations. They even use unary relations almost in all cases. Some people do not realise they use unary relations: for example, asserting an instance of a class.
The rule of thumb for using n-ary relations where n>2 is pretty trivial: use it if you cannot use just unary and/or binary ones. However, I think you know that any n-ary relation where n>2 can be represented as a combination of unary and/or binary relations.
Cheers,
Igor
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All,
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John
, entity books.example.com
and the book Lenny_the_Lion
participate. This relation has other components as well such as the purpose (birthday_gift
) and the amount ($15
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OK. I can’t resist any more. Lots of interesting stuff here, but the basic problem is that most of it conflates relationships/situations/activities with relations. They are not the same thing. Relationships (for example) are what one thing has to do with another (or itself) and the other is a mathematical structure that is often found useful in representing the first (and there are choices about how to do that).
Regards
Matthew West
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William,My position (and I sure Chris would agree) is that these are ontological distinctions.Language is polysemic and often polysemic in a systematic way. So, the termMarriage can refer both to an endurant and an event, and these two referents wouldbear some systematic relation between them.What makes a marriage (qua-endurant) relational is the fact that it isexistentially dependent on a multitude of individuals. For example, the specific marriageof John and Mary is existentially dependent on John and Mary, thus, binding them.That is why it can be the truthmaker of the relational proposition "John and Mary are married".If we look inside such an entity, this Marriage (again, qua-endurant) is a bundle of relationalqualities (tropes, modes) that are relational in nature (e.g., John's commitments and claims towards Mary,and Mary's commitments and claims towards John, etc).
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All,(without being restricted to any particular knowledge representation and reasoning language, because some are restricted only to binary, and some have design patters under that circumstance)What's your view on:- when to create a greater-than-binary relation rather than a binary relation?
Consider: you want to represent some information, statement, or knowledge, without necessarily being forced to limit to binary relations. A common example is when wanting to reference time. And 'between' is greater than binary.What are other pieces of knowledge that you'd want assert a ternary, or greater than binary relation to capture it accurately?Do you have any rules of thumb for knowing when to assert n-ary relations greater than binary?
Robert--
Dear Giancarlo,
Yes, I also looked at this some time ago:
West, Matthew Information Modelling: An analysis of the uses and meanings of associations PDT Europe 2002, PDF
And in my book
West, Matthew Developing High Quality Data Models Morgan Kaufmann 2011
Where Chapter 11 has a section on associations (aka situations).
Regards
Matthew West
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1) yes, there are multiple ontological cuts that can be made to reality. For example, a fourdimensionalist such as Chris wouldbelieve that not only John&Mary's marriage but also John and Mary are events. Someone holding my views, in contrast, willsee John, Mary, and John&Mary's Marriage as endurants to which there are events associated that will constitute John's Life, Mary's Life,John&Mary's Marriage's Life (actually, to each of these endurants, there are associated multiple possible lives but that is a different story -see ).
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You have probably noticed you got a wide variety of answers coming from
a diversity of conceptual frameworks and philosophical paradigms. It
gradually dawned on me some years ago these differences are most likely
matters of taste about which all dispute is futile, however much we go
ahead and do it anyway.
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On Wed, September 15, 2021 04:17, Giancarlo Guizzardi wrote:
> Hi William,
>
> What I meant to say with that passage is the following.
>
> 1) yes, there are multiple ontological cuts that can be made to reality.
> For example, a four-dimensionalist such as Chris would
> believe that not only John&Mary's marriage but also John and Mary are
> events. Someone holding my views, in contrast, will
> see John, Mary, and John&Mary's Marriage as endurants to which there are
> events associated that will constitute John's Life, Mary's Life,
> John&Mary's Marriage's Life (actually, to each of these endurants, there
> are associated multiple possible lives but that is a different story -
> see ).
Note that if one can reify both events and endurants, then both of you can
reify the same objects: John, Mary, John&Mary'sMarriage, John'sLife,
Mary'sLife, John&Mary'sMarriage'sLife.
One then defines these objects as instances of the same classes: Person,
Marriage, Person'sLife, Marriage'sLife. These can be agreed to be
subclasses of the same superclasses: Animal, Agreement, Animal'sLife,
Agreement'sLife. At some higher level, the ontologies would separate into
whether things are events or endurants (if desired).
> 2) What I mentioned that both Chris and I would hold is the view that
> things like John, Mary and John&Mary's Marriage are things
> that really exist in the world. So, the piece of language "John&Mary's
> Marriage" picks up something really out there. Again, for Chris,
> this would be an event; for me, this can polysemically refer to both the
> endurant binding them and one of its possible lives (an event).
This is no problem. It does not have to force itself at the level of the
individual or the immediate classes that each individual is an instance
of.
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On Tue, September 14, 2021 16:38, William Frank wrote:
> Thanks, Giancarlo
>
> I found this very helpful:
>
>> Now, what makes something like a marriage a true endurant is that it has
>> essence and accidents
>> (like any other endurant). John&Mary's marriage is essentially a marriage
>> but only contingently
>> a happily marriage, a marriage with full separation of assets, etc.
>> Thanks, Giancarlo
>
> And this is part of what I was trying to say:
>...
> Marriage can refer both to an endurant and an event, and these two
> referents would bear some systematic relation between them.
> ...
Events are rarely instantaneous. They normally have a starting and ending
time, and thus endure for some period of time.
For me, i normally use the word "situation" for relatively static states
of affairs, and restrict my use of the word "event" to a subclass of
"situation" in which change is important throughout its duration.
But i understand the term "event" is used above for what i would call a
"situation".
A marriage is a situation that is useful to reify, since there is a lot to
say about it. The marriage starts with a subevent called a wedding and
ends with an event such as a death or divorce.
-- doug f
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Azamat Abdoulaev wrote: Indeed, we need to go for a real-world AI paradigm shift, recalling how it was originally defined
Here it is:
John McCarthy called it “artificial intelligence.” The participants at the 1956 Dartmouth Conference (formally, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence) agreed: “…every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” Machine meant “an agent that manipulates symbols.” The extended workshop at Dartmouth College (where McCarthy, who applied for funds at the Rockefeller Foundation, was teaching) was documented in detail by Ray Solomonoff (1956).
https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04306
Mihai Nadin
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Thanks for this comment, and for highlighting the same idea in a second illustration.
Unless some specific force or motive or context drives the selection of specific facets of some situation or object, the generalization of ontology is a lost cause. There is no doubt this is true.
So – any attempt to “universalize ontology” should build this principle into the design. In this sense, every working ontology or categorization of reality into words and categories is “context specific”. Ontology must contain a motivational principle that creates a specifying criteria for selection – in this case, “what the customer wants”.
> Every one of those applications was paid for by a customer that specified the problem to be solved and provided the data to be used and the specifications of the software it had to be connected to.
It’s not that “a universal ontology is impossible.” It’s that it must be universally fluent and adaptive to infinite variation in all its dimensionality, so that it can respond to every possible specific context and situation for every possible purpose.
Bruce Schuman
Santa Barbara CA USA
bruces...@cox.net / 805-705-9174
www.origin.org / www.integralontology.net / www.newcongress.net
****
John
********
Bruce,
I agree, but would like to point out that one can generalize the scope of any given context-specific ontology beyond what a single customer wants. And many ontologies do just that. The issue from my perspective is that we don’t have a generally accepted way for describing what specific range of customers and contexts in which a given ontology might be applicable or useful. The SCOPE model is an extensible attempt to provide such a multi-dimensional scope “yardstick” for certain types of contexts.
We don’t have to choose between the “universal” ontology and the context-specific ontology. Rather we can choose ontologies that are useful in many commonly encountered contexts and scopes of applicability – and get buy in from the target group of customers. But we have to be specific about what their scope of applicability is, and ideally, make that information available as part of the representation of that ontology itself. This description of the applicable scope dimensions doesn’t have to be universally understandable – just by the target user and application set and applicable scope ranges.
If we have a growing body of such ontologies, we can then develop publicly accessible mappings between them, along with warnings/caveats about where the mappings won’t work, or work only with some pragmatic work-arounds that have some known flaws/shortcomings. Potential users can then decide whether to use them, develop their own mappings, or develop some new context-specific or domain specific ontology that addresses whatever shortcoming the existing ontologies have for their current purposes (assuming that’s feasible/pragmatic).
Hans Polzer
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Hans –
Good points, and thank you. I did study the SCOPE project a couple of years ago, and put the PDF online here: http://originresearch.com/docs/ScopeInteroperability2008.pdf
Right now, I am laughing, thinking about Azamat’s claim that supercomputers are going to figure out how human beings are going to cooperate to solve problems like the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). I’d like to see a rough sketch of that algorithm (step by step process to make it happen). How do they fix what John Sowa recently called “lying politicians”?
So, my thoughts on “universal ontology” are nested inside this kind of thinking. It so happens that just today, I sent an idealistic 1200 word essay to a group I work with called The Great Transition Initiative https://greattransition.org/ for publication in their current dialogue about a “World Constitution” and the problems of global governance. Earlier this morning, I watched a fascinating YouTube video on “the dark side” of life in the Sahara desert in Mauritania, where (among other things) slavery is still practiced.
What could ontology do to support some global governance or stability initiative? I’d say it would need to embody a very strong inherent ethic supporting some of kind of homeostatic/cybernetic model of democracy.
This kind of thinking influences my motivation for a universal or extremely inclusive ontology, that innately fastens all these fundamental parts together. I was just now looking at the “Sowa Diamond” model – and not understanding how that model supports an integral ontology. http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/toplevel.htm
This is a hint on my motivation. I want to find a way to get beyond inherent “localization of motivation” and the assumption that this is the only way to go. I incline to the claim that this is an industry-wide myopia (short-sightedness), and we should be pushing for breakthrough, rather than presuming that the subject is impossible and there’s no way forward.
In this comment, I want to consider the claim that it might (?) be innate underlying presumptions or tradition that limit the scope of what an ontology can do. I know this might be bit reckless – but my idea right now is that the entire project or industry is thrown a little off-balance by the dominance of an empirical (or bottom up) point of view, which functions by looking at the world and trying to organize the objects or events that are visible or apparent. My argument might simply be that we ought to start with the category system first, and then converge that framework towards a perfect fit with the real-world empiricism or experience. This approach might then hope to argue that every specific subset can be correctly interpreted as part of a global whole, where all the relations are or could be highly ordered.
Somebody here more knowledgeable than I might immediately show why this is wrong, but I think what is happening is that professional working ontologists are very naturally looking around their world, and forming lists of the things they see or can identify, and building category systems to organize those objects. Perhaps the prevailing assumption is that “the objects are (of course) naturally prior to the categories we place them in.”
Here’s a picture of a lattice, that looks a lot like the Sowa Diamond. I would need to study this more to see how this idea supports a working practical ontology, and maybe somebody could show me an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_(order)#/media/File:Lattice_of_partitions_of_an_order_4_set.svg
I want to explore ways to supplant the lattice model of ontology with a hierarchical model. Why can’t a working ontology be 100% linearly hierarchical? If this approach could work, I think the entire subject of semantic ontology could explode towards generalization. I might take a little time to consider how all the elements defined in the Sowa Diamond could be rearranged or interpreted within a hierarchy rather than a lattice.
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HP> I agree, but would like to point out that one can generalize the scope of any given context-specific ontology beyond what a single customer wants.
Bruce> Thank you. I am thinking about how that could work (explore what customers and situations have in common, etc.)
HP> And many ontologies do just that. The issue from my perspective is that we don’t have a generally accepted way for describing what specific range of customers and contexts in which a given ontology might be applicable or useful. The SCOPE model is an extensible attempt to provide such a multi-dimensional scope “yardstick” for certain types of contexts.
Bruce> I thought the SCOPE model was a good example of cooperative development.
HP> We don’t have to choose between the “universal” ontology and the context-specific ontology. Rather we can choose ontologies that are useful in many commonly encountered contexts and scopes of applicability – and get buy in from the target group of customers. But we have to be specific about what their scope of applicability is, and ideally, make that information available as part of the representation of that ontology itself. This description of the applicable scope dimensions doesn’t have to be universally understandable – just by the target user and application set and applicable scope ranges.
Bruce> Yes. Maybe the buy-in from customers reflects their adaptability to work with assumptions or concepts shared by other customers.
I am visualizing these more specific solutions in a very broad context, such as the UN SDGs. So, I want to see “interdisciplinary interoperability” in a single context, in a single space. We need cooperative interaction from 1000+ independent agencies exerting influence across many disciplines, and learning from one another. Maybe this includes private citizens, local governments, etc. Plus, we want a built-in ethic.
HP> If we have a growing body of such ontologies, we can then develop publicly accessible mappings between them, along with warnings/caveats about where the mappings won’t work, or work only with some pragmatic work-arounds that have some known flaws/shortcomings.
Bruce> Yes. And maybe (?) broader general standards could emerge from these interactions (??)
HP> Potential users can then decide whether to use them, develop their own mappings, or develop some new context-specific or domain specific ontology that addresses whatever shortcoming the existing ontologies have for their current purposes (assuming that’s feasible/pragmatic).
Bruce> Yes. I think I am presuming a kind of common underlying motivation – that may seldom exist in most commercial contexts. Yes, I want to sell my product, but I want to do it in a collaborative context.
Just one thought that is floating in my head regarding “top level ontology”. Instead of calling the top level “thing” – how about calling it “everything” – and then partition that space under local motivation.... (?)
And just as I post this, I get a news flash on my phone about advances in “reservoir computing”
Bruce,
re: Azamaat's Claim:
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe". - Carl Sagan
Are we doing AI now, not ontology? Or, are you asking how do we make an ontology that can hold the universe?
-John Bottoms--
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Hi John. I’m not sure I understand your question.
But this below quick Google search probably makes my point.
If an ontology is “a specification of the meanings of symbols in an information system – a specification of a conceptualization”, I am interested in ways to generalize that process. So, this involves a theory of semantics and the structure of concepts.
People on Ontolog have argued about “what a concept is” – but I personally think this is a silly question. If you keep it simple, you understand it. If you think about it too much, you might get confused, and invent some goofy or meaningless projects (“there are no such things as trees”).
What I am looking for is common ground – a place where the human community can come together and figure out how we can live together in our shrinking one-world context.
Maybe the starting point for me is 0 – the coordinate origin. Let’s agree on that. To paraphrase Lord of the Rings, “One zero to rule them all”
But I tend to suppose we CAN figure out a “concept of all concepts” – a “concept that contains all concepts” – and which is formed from (defined in terms of) a universal symbolic language, probably grounded in binary, from which every possible abstract symbolic structure can be defined.
So let’s define that thing – and maybe get it running in a global network of AI super computers, as their common ground and maybe their operating system, or some level within it.
Let’s not do philosophy as “hot air rising”. Let’s do it as highly motivated real-world systems engineering for a world that works.
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People on Ontolog have argued about “what a concept is” – but I personally think this is a silly question. If you keep it simple, you understand it. If you think about it too much, you might get confused, and invent some goofy or meaningless projects (“there are no such things as trees”).
"One of the great breakthroughs of modern science, Galileo and the Galilean period, was the ability to be puzzled about things that seemed obvious… that’s a tremendous step forward, for literally thousands of years it had been accepted by important scientists that we have answers to some very simple questions like [cups fall and steam rises because as Aristotle said] they are seeking their natural place.”
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"Right now, I am laughing, thinking about Azamat’s claim that supercomputers are going to figure out how human beings are going to cooperate to solve problems like the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). I’d like to see a rough sketch of that algorithm (step by step process to make it happen). How do they fix what John Sowa recently called “lying politicians”?
So, my thoughts on “universal ontology” are nested inside this kind of thinking. It so happens that just today, I sent an idealistic 1200 word essay to a group I work with called The Great Transition Initiative https://greattransition.org/ for publication in their current dialogue about a “World Constitution” and the problems of global governance. Earlier this morning, I watched a fascinating YouTube video on “the dark side” of life in the Sahara desert in Mauritania, where (among other things) slavery is still practiced.
What could ontology do to support some global governance or stability initiative? I’d say it would need to embody a very strong inherent ethic supporting some of kind of homeostatic/cybernetic model of democracy".
It looks, the author missed the whole message. The things are exactly opposite, the RSI involves the collective human intelligence enhanced with SUPER-POWERFUL FRIENDLY COMPLEMENTARY machine intelligence:
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Bruce wrote:
But I tend to suppose we CAN figure out a “concept of all concepts” – a “concept that contains all concepts” – and which is formed from (defined in terms of) a universal symbolic language, probably grounded in binary, from which every possible abstract symbolic structure can be defined.
So let’s define that thing – and maybe get it running in a global network of AI super computers, as their common ground and maybe their operating system, or some level within it.
A “concept that contains all concepts” is "Everything/World/Realty".
A “concept that contains no concepts or contained in all concepts” is "Nothing".
And "Anything" is between the supremum and infimum in the world' lattice order, like the Hasse diagram:
This paradigm makes the core of the RSI's Reality model and its Master algorithm.
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