Re: CCAT
fritz@rodin.wustl.edu (Fritz Lehmann)
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 94 11:14:24 CDT
From: fritz@rodin.wustl.edu (Fritz Lehmann)
Message-id: <9409141614.AA15215@rodin.wustl.edu>
To: willems@cs.vu.nl
Subject: Re: CCAT
Cc: cg@cs.umn.edu, pdoudna@aol.com, srkb@cs.umbc.edu
Sender: owner-srkb@cs.umbc.edu
Precedence: bulk
Dear Mark,
You wrote:
---begin quote---
Surely these subjects cannot be regarded seperately. DEEP CASES are
PARTicipant relations between OBJECT and EVENT/PROCESSes, that in turn
may be viewed as SITUATIONS that have TIME and SPACE coordinates. And
MEASURING is an ACT that combines UNITS to values for PARTS, etcetera.
Of course this pushes the combination a little far, but the
ontological entities distinguished in one ontology may influence those
distinguished in the other. Maybe part-whole structure between ACT and
PROCESS (a series of small actions) seems to parallel that between
TIME points and time PERIODs as in [ACT]-(ptim)->[TIME] vs.
[PROCESS]-(dur)->[PERIOD].
How do you envision organising the correlations between all these
subjects?
Mark
---end quote---
Of course you're right. I envision coordination between
the subgroups by email communication and inter-subgroup
email review of proposed definitions. I attempted to list
the CCAT subgroups in order of their main dependency. Thus
TIME assumes intervals and relations from ABSTRACT ALGEBRA/
DISCRETE MATH, SPACE takes stuff from TIME and generalizes
it to three dimensions, PART-WHOLE arranges things spatio-
temporally, OBJECT/EVENT/PROCESS has spatiotemporal extents
and PARTS, DEEP-CASE relates OBJECTS to EVENTS (see Hartley''s
article in my Semantic Networks collection), MEASUREMENT
involves MATH, TIME, SPACE and REPRESENTATION, etc. People
will theorize at different rates, but I hope the more basic
ones will be done well enough for the later ones to plug
into them. Some of the earlier ones exist already in
machine form in KIF-Math, Metamath, et alia.
I'm afraid it's just a necessary fact that changes in
one sub-ontology will have effects rippling through the others.
CYC has developed means to limit the damage, but these are
unavailable to us. We'll just have to work together. I hope
for complete consistency within the "core", but not necessarily
in the sub-ontologies outside the core.
Before sweating over the formalities, it's important
for people to indicate the concepts and relations they'd
need or would like to see in the "core" subgroups. We
should be "needs driven" rather than just philosophizing-
driven, I think. People with real-world problems that
need solving could make a contribution just by stating
wish-lists of primitives they would consider handy.
The CG (Conceptual Graphs) and SRKB (shared ontologies)
lists have been pretty inactive lately. I intend to post
messages containing ontological interest to both groups
for the time being, until we start getting too system-
specific or until a chorus of protest arises. I encourage
others writing on ontology to do the same. Of course there
ar CG'ers who do implementation and have zero interest in
ontologies, but they can delete messages with CCAT in the
subject-line.
Mark, I (guessing) listed you under DEEP-CASE and
NATURAL-LANGUAGE, but I suspect you have others that
interest you. A number of people have emailed me picking
different CCAT subgroups for themselves. Let me know
what you want.
Yours truly, Fritz Lehmann
GRANDAI Software, 4282 Sandburg Way, Irvine, CA 92715, U.S.A.
Tel:(714)-733-0566 Fax:(714)-733-0506 fritz@rodin.wustl.edu
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