Dear Seminar Participants,
Thanks for your attendance and participation at Sowa's talk.
I'm collecting notes and comments on the session(s).
Geoffrey shared his notes with me, which I include below.
Following Geoff's notes, I've added some more links and
references. If you have anything to add, please share.
Best,
Andrea
----Here are [Geoff's] notes on Sowa's talk/seminar.
1. The important skills described by Sowa break down into two types:
1.1 The ability to develop a Ontology for a field. This involves understanding what an ontology might be, and thinking about a field so as do be able to describe the objects of that field and their relationships rigorously.
1.2 The ability to describe truths formally about the field in terms of the ontology. This would involve some ability to use a formal logical language. Sowa nicely discussed how one can move from a tree to statements about relationships using differentia (A body is a material thing.)
Underlying these are an understanding of the history of philosophy and mathematics.
2. Sowa gave us quick summary of the history of Ontology from Aristotle to Scholastic instruction. It would be interesting to compare this to standard philosophy discussions of the history of Ontology. This raises the possibility that we could collect a subset of historical documents so that thinking ontologically could be recapitulated through historically important works starting with Aristotle. Here is my rough list of some of the thinkers involved. I have put stars next to those mentioned by Sowa. (Some are names I wrote down.)
*Aristotle *Augustine *Peter of Spain *William of Occam Descartes, Hume, Kant - I have a sense that Kant's categories are important, but perhaps more for a psychology and for later developments in Continental thought *Frege, Carnap, Russell, Whitehead *Pierce "Reasoning and the logic of things" James, Dewey, Royce, Rorty - a pragmatic tradition that might be more accessible, but probably less relevant *Wittgenstein
There might be some good potted histories of ontology that would be more efficient than reading the original sources. Could a good philosopher suggest one. What would an undergrad course on ontology include? (Can't find one at UVA. Check out http://wings.buffalo.edu/philosophy/department/grad_program/ontology.htm)
Here are the readings from the article on ontology in the Routledge Encylopedia of Philosophy: (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/encyphil/)
Heidegger, M. (1953) An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Manheim, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959. (Heidegger's understanding of being. Readers new to Heidegger may not find this as introductory as the title had led them to hope.)
Kant, I. (1781, 1787) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan, 1929.(For the famous passage about existence not being a predicate, A598/B626-A601/B629; for the distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves a good example is A45/B62-A46/B63.)
Nozick, R. (1981) Philosophical Explanations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chapter 2, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' is at times a little bewildering, but good fun - for the more experienced reader.)
Quine, W.V. (1948) 'On What There is, in From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. (Classic paper on existence and ontological commitment. First published in the Review of Metaphysics.)
Williams, C.J.F. (1981) What is Existence?, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Extensive discussion of all the issues arising out of the 'logic and language' - rather than the 'deep metaphysics' approach to existence.)
3. Jerry raised the issue of document analysis. I wonder if there is an alternative tradition which overlaps with ontology that would be more accessible to literary students. I am thinking of hermeneutics Spinoza, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer... Some of these like Heidegger think long and hard about ontology but in a very different way than thinkers in the analytical tradition. How would one compare Heidegger's ontology to Pierce? Not sure what to do with this, but I do think Jerry is right that we need to introduce the issue of interpretation of texts into the discourse and an awareness of the history of texts. I may be wrong about what Jerry was getting at.
4. Sowa commented on the use of graphs and how they connect to other forms of representation. This should be pursued. In his paper he says that the two are interchangeable.
5. Knowledge Extraction - John Skuse (sp?) - Ottawa - Skuse, according to Sowa has built some knowledge extraction tools for students that a) produce concordances, and b) try to pull out statements of the sort A is B. We need more info about this.
I wonder how such tools compare to automatic classification tools developed by library scientists. My impression was that the automatic classification tools were statistical tools that compared the vocab of a document to a information about the statistics on texts to identify what the text was about (in order to automatically classify it.) I wonder if there are really two approaches to trying to automatically figure out what a text is about - the nlp approach and the brute statistical approach. John Unsworth mentioned reading he had done in this area.
6. We talked about exercises for students to develop their ontological ability. Sowa mentioned that students break into those that want a concrete task and those who want to philosophize. He has exercises for both.
7. During the talk postmodern databases were metioned as a reaction to OO databases or Post OO. Aspect oriented databases, Multimedimensional? Sowa mentioned a recent ACM issue on this. Check out online. Search ACM portal reveals the issue is vol 44, issue 10. Here is the table of contents:
Communications of the ACM >archive Volume 44 , Issue 10 (October 2001)
Table of Contents
Editorial pointers Diane Crawford Page: 5
News Track Robert Fox Pages: 9 - 10
Forum Diane Crawford Pages: 11 - 12
The business of software: zeppelins and jet planes: a metaphor for modern software projects Phillip Armour Pages: 13 - 15
From Washington: considering the broadband debate Neil Munro Pages: 17 - 19
Viewpoint: the real reason why software engineers need math Keith Devlin Pages: 21 - 22
Viewpoint: the ACM declaration in Felten v. RIAA Barbara Simons Pages: 23 - 26
Aspect-oriented programming Tzilla Elrad, Robert E. Filman, Atef Bader Pages: 29 - 32
Discussing aspects of AOP Tzilla Elrad, Mehmet Aksits, Gregor Kiczales, Karl Lieberherr, Harold Ossher Pages: 33 - 38
Aspect-oriented programming with adaptive methods Karl Lieberherr, Doug Orleans, Johan Ovlinger Pages: 39 - 41
Using multidimensional separation of concerns to (re)shape evolving software Harold Ossher, Peri Tarr Pages: 43 - 50
Composing crosscutting concerns using composition filters Lodewijk Bergmans, Mehmet Aksits Pages: 51 - 57
Getting started with ASPECTJ Gregor Kiczales, Erik Hilsdale, Jim Hugunin, Mik Kersten, Jeffrey Palm, William Griswold Pages: 59 - 65
Analyzing the role of aspects in software design J. Andrés Díaz Pace, Marcelo R. Campo Pages: 66 - 73
Does aspect-oriented programming work? Gail C. Murphy, Robert J. Walker, Elisa L. A. Baniassad, Martin P. Robillard, Albert Lai, Mik A. Kersten Kersten Pages: 75 - 77
Structuring operating system aspects Yvonne Coady, Gregor Kiczales, Mike Feeley, Norm Hutchinson, Joon Suan Ong Pages: 79 - 82
A layered approach to building open aspect-oriented systems Paniti Netinant, Tzilla Elrad, Mohamed E. Fayad Pages: 83 - 85
Handling crosscutting constraints in domain-specific modeling Jeff Gray, Ted Bapty, Sandeep Neema, James Tuck Pages: 87 - 93
Aspect-oriented programming using reflection and metaobject protocols Gregory T. Sullivan Pages: 95 - 97
High-performance Java Cherri Pancake, Christian Lengauer Pages: 98 - 101
The NINJA project José E. Moreira, Samuel P. Midkiff, Manish Gupta, Pedro V. Artigas, Peng Wu, George Almasi Pages: 102 - 109
Enabling Java for high-performance computing Thilo Kielmann, Philip Hatcher, Luc Bougé, Henri E. Bal Pages: 110 - 117
Multiparadigm communications in Java for grid computing Vladimir Getov, Gregor von Laszewski, Michael Philippsen, Ian Foster Pages: 118 - 125
Technical opinion: The emperor with no clothes Henry F. Ledgard Pages: 126 - 128
Technical opinion: Hello, world considered harmful Ralph Westfall Pages: 129 - 130
Inside Risks: The perils of port 80 Stephan Somogyi, Bruce Schneier Page: 168
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Links:
Sowa's talk: http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/ontology.htm
New article: "Signs, Processes, and Language Games" http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.htm
Bibliography: http://www.jfsowa.com/bib.htm
cyc ontology: http://www.cyc.com
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