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Session Track 1
Duration 1 hour
Date/Time 29 Jan 2025 17:00 GMT
9:00am PST/12:00pm EST
5:00pm GMT/6:00pm CET
Convener Gary Berg-Cross

Ontology Summit 2025 Track 1

Agenda

Giancarlo Guizzardi

  • Title: "Explanation, Semantics, and Ontology"
  • Abstract: It is well-known by now that, of the so-called 4Vs of Big Data (Velocity, Volume, Variety and Veracity), the bulk of effort and challenge is in the latter two: (1) data comes in a large variety of representations (both from a syntactic and semantic point of view); (2) data can only be useful if truthful to the part of reality that it is supposed to represent. Moreover, the most relevant questions we need to have answered in science, government and organizations can only be answered if we put together data that reside in different data silos, which are produced in a concurrent manner by different agents and in different points of time and space. Thus, data is only useful in practice if it can (semantically) interoperate with other data. Every data schema represents a certain conceptualization, i.e., it makes an ontological commitment to a certain worldview. Issue (2) is about understanding the relation between data schemas and their underlying conceptualizations. Issue (1) is about safely connecting these different conceptualisations represented in different schemas. To address (1) and (2), we need to be able to properly explain these data schemas, i.e., to reveal the real-world semantics (or the ontological commitments) behind them. In this talk, I discuss the strong relation between the notions of real-world semantics, ontology, and explanation. I will present a notion of explanation termed Ontological Unpacking, which aims at explaining symbolic representation artifacts (conceptual models connected to data schemas, knowledge graphs, logical specifications). I show that these artifacts when produced by Ontological Unpacking differ from their traditional counterparts not only in their expressivity but also on their nature: while the latter typically merely have a descriptive nature, the former have an explanatory one. Moreover, I show that it is exactly this explanatory nature that is required for semantic interoperability. I will also discuss the relation between Ontological Unpacking and other forms of explanation in philosophy and science, as well as in Artificial Intelligence. I will argue that the current trend in XAI (Explainable AI) in which “to explain is to produce a symbolic artifact” (e.g., a decision tree or a counterfactual description) is an incomplete project resting on a false assumption, that these artifacts are not “inherently interpretable”, and that they should be taken as the beginning of the road to explanation, not the end. This talk is based on the following paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169023X24000491
  • Slides
  • Video Recording

Conference Call Information

Discussion

12:53:24 Ítalo Oliveira: This talk and the paper are very insightful. The ideas open novel research paths. That said, could you elaborate on how to make these ideas more operational? I mean, having those, what can we do as computer scientists?

12:56:11 jfdel: Explaining is more about the... reasoning" The underlying ontology can be stated up front, but the point of explainability of showing the links in the actual case. and the reasoning applied.
12:57:40 jfdel: How to do that with RDF ? You can explain applied structure and reasoning to humans based on a big bowl of triplets? You need semantic graphs.

12:57:54 Alican Tüzün: From a semiotic perspective (the study of signs and meaning-making), could the integration of "entities" or elements from a dictionary definition itself constitute an explanation? For example, if we deconstruct a term into its defined components (e.g., "gravity = force + attraction + mass"), does that act of breaking down and reassembling linguistic units inherently explain the concept, or is explanation something more contextual?

12:59:41 jfdel: "You have a tendency to use terms in a slightly different way than the way they are normally used." says Barry Smith

That would a major flaw, in the world of ontology...

13:00:14 Nicola Guarino: The rose is red in virtue of its color

13:00:23 jfdel: Philosophy of Language is not required here.
13:04:15 jfdel: Replying to "The rose is red in v...

Hm... It has a color, but this is a specific range of color (plus, with a hue). What is... "in virtue" (rather by virtue) of a property?

Or do you mean color as a facet, property name or the typical color of red-roses, or the specific color of this specific rose?

13:04:38 Nicola Guarino: Answering Michael Gruninger: an explanatory ontology is more accurate than a merely descriptive ontology. This is why explainability impacts the quality of an ontology

13:04:58 Ítalo Oliveira: Reacted to "Answering Michael Gr..." with ❤️

13:05:38 João Paulo A. Almeida: If you say that what explains that the rose is red is the redness of the rose, … what is explained?
13:06:20 João Paulo A. Almeida: If you say that the color needs to be in a certain region of a conceptual space, then you are explaining something!

13:06:37 Nicola Guarino: Here is the paper on weak truth making: https://app.paperpile.com/my-library/Guarino-et-al-2019-pDKnAvJXkBYaq_HYPJJLyIA

13:06:50 Mark Underwood: Reacted to "Here is the paper on..." with 👍

13:09:05 Mike Bennett: I would add something for Com Sci: use separation of concerns. The ontology that Giancarlo describes is about reality not data; Then identify the data surrogates for the possible things in the world that are relevant to the application use case and stand those up in a separate, logical design namespace (may be RDF or RDB etc.). and add the trace links from data to real things.

13:09:23 João Paulo A. Almeida: Reacted to "I would add somethin..." with 👍

13:15:21 Mark Underwood: Reacted to "I would add somethin..." with 👍

13:17:05 Nicola Guarino: Reacted to "If you say that the ..." with 👍

13:18:14 João Paulo A. Almeida: Bye all, thanks!

13:18:20 jfdel: Boils down to what?

Resources

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ConferenceCall 2025 01 22Keynote
ConferenceCall 2025 01 15Overview

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ConferenceCall 2025 02 05Track 1
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