Position paper for panel discussion "Foundations of Information Systems" Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2000 Brisbane, Australia 6-8 December 2000
Where does the ontology bottom out?
Robert M. Colomb School of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering The University of Queensland QLD 4072 Australia
Extended Abstract
Ontologies are collections of terms with a more or less complex structure, most often used to support interorganisational interoperability. The question is, what are the primitives? I contend that the primitives must be grounded in more-or-less explicit agreements among the parties. The contracts, the standard business practices as formulated in EDI, agreed primitive terms for the product catalogs, prices, etc, all supported by a legal and audit environment. The structural relationships are grounded in more general agreements which take the form of mathematical systems which are standardised in the educational systems of the developed world.
Interactions among parties involve nouns, verbs and behavioural norms. In the world of organisational interoperability, the ontology agreed among the parties provides the nouns. The verbs are either messages representing speech acts or recording physical actions taken as a result of speech acts. So far as the information systems are concerned, the verbs are members of standardised genres of messages this is what EDI is all about. The interaction is mediated by an agreed set of EDI message types containing agreed elements. The behavioural norms are in the first instance specified by policies represented in contracts among the parties. The policies specify what can be done, what must be done and what must not be done.
All of this happens in a global context, where the major structural
relationships are essentially implicit. In some cases the structural
relationships are grounded in widely understood semiotic systems,
such as arithmetic or the first order predicate calculus, which
are widely taught in educational institutions. The remainder are
elements of the basic linguistic and behavioural repertoire that
as Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
are "pointed to" rather than defined, for example a
sequence (Wittgenstein's thesis is that it is impossible to define
what we mean by sequence without using knowledge of sequences.).