[om] Standard .. Ontologies for Math

[Andreas Strotmann]

I believe this site used to have a very interesting discussion on how to
build an "ontology" for physical units, which I heartily recommend as
input to those working on that project.

That said, I found the concept of "ontologies" to be somewhat orthogonal
to what OpenMath was aiming at.  The extremely detailed formal semantics
that seemed to come with them looked like overkill in our context,
precisely because CA systems are not logic systems.  Perhaps the derived
concept of "top-level ontologies" is much closer to what OpenMath is
aiming at -- ontologies that treat concepts as atomic that any given
implementation would most likely treat as analyzable.

I think this makes good sense in this context.  The nitty-gritty details
of the exact semantics of a convept are crucial when computing with them,
but they just might clutter up the communication channel completely.
We're dealing with knowledge communication, not representation.  Thus, I'm
very glad to hear that OpenMath is less detailed than the Stanford site.

 -- Andreas

____________________________________________________________
"The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today
all the exhilaration of a vice." -
G.K.Chesterton: A Defense of Humilities, The Defendant, 1901
                           www.chesterton.org/acs/quotes.htm

On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Richard Fateman wrote:

> I encountered recently a list of ontologies from
> Stanford's Knowledge Systems Lab.
> Among others, they include a framework for
> Abstract Algebra  that might be of interest
> to OM.
> I suggest people (James? David?) writing CDs look around at
> this site.
>
> http://piano.stanford.edu/concur/examples/html-lib/abstract-algebra/index.html
>
> RJF
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