Re: Some questions (and a new ontology)
Bruce Schuman <origin@rain.org>
Date: Tue, 3 Jan 1995 13:14:37 -0800 (PST)
From: Bruce Schuman <origin@rain.org>
To: Andre Valente <andre@paulus.lri.jur.uva.nl>
Cc: ontolingua@HPP.Stanford.EDU, srkb@cs.umbc.edu
Subject: Re: Some questions (and a new ontology)
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Hello, Ontolingua. Thanks for a fascinating glimpse into a very potent
analytic domain.
On Tue, 3 Jan 1995, Andre Valente wrote:
> There are many other issues about this ontology which I would like to
> discuss later on. Law is a fascinating field for "ontological
> engineering" because it has a very strong commonsense flavour (BTW,
> what is the right list to make this sort of discussion?).
I'd be very interested to monitor the growth of this work, and would
appreciate being kept informed of new developments,
I'd also like to mention that I have done some original work in related
areas, involving an attempt to *generalize* the concept of "algebraic
ontology".
In a nutshell, this approach involves an isomorphism between the concepts
of "dimension" and "ordered class". Both can be seen as an "ordered list
of values".
This approach opens the way to a linearly recursive (bottomless
decomposition) definition of class and category structure, through which
any conceptual/digital structure can be defined. Categories, classes, and
concepts can all be defined as composite assemblies of "synthetic
dimensions", and the elements *within* any class/category/concept are also
defined by their values in (synthetic) dimensions. Thus, the entire
structure -- categories and their contents -- can be built from a single
algebraic primitive, which, in its most basic form, is nothing other than
a "cut", or distinction. In these terms, the general form of analysis is
the linear fractal decomposition: "a cut on a cut on a cut on a cut...".
I think this approach leads to a complete algebraic generalization of
ontology.
An introductory overview of this approach is available on WWW, at
http://rain.org/~origin/sr/sr2
Thanks very much to everybody on this list. This is certainly one of the
most intriguing and creative (and important) subject areas in current
knowledge engineering.
- Bruce Schuman
ORIGIN RESEARCH
origin@rain.org
http://rain.org/~origin/