...I'd like to add that behavioral studies with birds and mammals may be
a reasonable scope, but, experts need to speak I think!
Best,
Martin
On 10/11/2021 6:50 PM, Martin Doerr via Crm-sig wrote:
Dear George, Robert,
This makes generally sense to me as a discussion starting point.
However, I‘d like to remind you that our methodology requires first a
community practice of doing documentation about such things, and
second domain experts for concepts that are not our primary knowledge.
To my best knowledge, there does not exist any reliable concept of
what individuality means across the animal kingdom, nor what a
collective of such individuals is. There is an unbelievable complexity
to these questions. We know from experience that any global widening
of scope can blur all distinctions ontology enginerring relies on.
Therefore I'd regard it as most important to find the experts first
and let them speak.
The reasons why we did not model animal actors is precisely the lack
of an experts group to communicate with.
Best,
Martin
On 10/11/2021 4:28 PM, George Bruseker wrote:
Dear all,
In preparation for the discussion of non-human actors as related to
use cases arising in Linked.Art (inter alia), Rob and I have sketched
some ideas back and forth to try to find a monotonic was to add the
agency of animals in the first instance into CRM (proceeding in an
empirical bottom up fashion) and then see where else we might also
get added in (searching for the sibling class that Martin suggests
and the generalization that it would need).
The linked sketch provides a proposal for discussion. The background
is given already in this issue.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RtKBvAH1N0G8yaE_io6hU2Z8MTBmH_8-/view?usp=sharing
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RtKBvAH1N0G8yaE_io6hU2Z8MTBmH_8-/view?usp=sharing>
(draw.io <http://draw.io>)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aCEBtXjW8M0W7qCGe9ozSMeYAH7tJ3Wr/view?usp=sharing
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aCEBtXjW8M0W7qCGe9ozSMeYAH7tJ3Wr/view?usp=sharing>
(png)
Here is some argumentation.
Up to now, CRM takes its scope as related to documenting intentional
acts of human beings. Its top level class then has been E39 Actor
which gives properties which allow the assigning of
responsibility for an intentional activity. It has two subclasses,
E21 Person and E74 Group. These two kinds of being have different
behaviour, therefore properties, therefore classes.
If we expand the scope (in base or in sci or wherever) to include
animal agency in the first instance, then we must have a way to
monotonically generate this extension (we don't want to just expand
the scope of E39 Actor because then we will end up with rabbits being
responsible for financial crises and murders and all sorts of nonsense).
So we want to introduce a sibling class for E39 Actor. Call this
biological agent. Instances can be anything biological. This would
obviously be some sort of a superclass of E21 Person, since all
persons are biological actors as well. It would be a subclass of
biological object since all biological agents must be biological.
(but not all things biological are biological agents)
Then we would want a general class that subsumes the agency of purely
human actors and biological agents. This would be our top class. Here
we come up with a more general notion of agency. Whereas E39 Actor
was declared in order to account for a 'legal persons notion' of
agency common to Western legal systems etc. (and is perfectly
adequate for the scope of CRM Base), this would be a broader notion
of agency.
In order to avoid impossible philosophical arguments around self
consciousness, we can give a more externalist scope note /
intension to this class. Agency has to do with those entities which
display self organization and action towards an end from an external
perspective. This way we avoid having to know if the other really has
a self. If it looks like it is acting intentionally and people
document it as such, then so it is.
This now gives us a super class (and eventually super properties) for
all agents.
But wait... we need more.
CRMBase distinguishes between persons and groups. Whereas persons
must have both agency and be individuated corporeal beings, groups do
not. Persons are atomic and irreducible (can't be made up of more
persons, can't be spread over multiple bodies / time zones). Groups
are composed of persons and groups. Groups are inherently collective.
If we wish then to have this same distinction reflected into the
biological domain we would need a class for individual biological
agents parallel / sibling to person and a class for collective
biological agents, parallel / sibling to group.
Doing this one would then need the superclasses to subsume these
divisions. Hence:
Individual Agent: subclass of Agent, superclass of individual
biological agent
Collective Agent: subclass of Agent, superclass of collective
biological agent and human group
This finally allows us to have:
Individual Biological Agent: subclass of Biological Agent and
Individual Agent: used for individual birds, trees, and other
biological actors
Collective Biological Agent: subclass of Biological Agent and
Collective Agent: used for flocks, forests and other group biological
actors (unlike human groups, such groups are inherently corporeal)
And at that point we might consider renaming our existing classes to
'human' xxx
So
E39 Human Agent: subclass of agent, no real change in intension, the
kind of entity that can take action for which legal responsibility
can be attributed within human cultures societies
E21 Human Person: no real change in intension but its superclass
becomes individual biological agent and human agent (ie an animal
that can be held legallly responsible for its actions)
E74 Group no real change in intension, but it gains a super class
Collective Agent so it can be queried together with other agent groups.
This analysis does not get into the properties which are, of course,
fundamental but sketches a possible path for creating the structure
necessary to create this extension of scope in such a way that it
would respect the principle of monotonicity in revising the model
while allowing the growth of the model to handle the many use cases
of documented animal agency that fall within CH institution's
documentary scope.
Hope this is a good starting point for a constructive discussion!
Best,
George
--
------------------------------------
Dr. Martin Doerr
Honorary Head of the
Center for Cultural Informatics
Information Systems Laboratory
Institute of Computer Science
Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)
N.Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton,
GR70013 Heraklion,Crete,Greece
Vox:+30(2810)391625
Email:[email protected]
Web-site:http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl
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--
------------------------------------
Dr. Martin Doerr
Honorary Head of the
Center for Cultural Informatics
Information Systems Laboratory
Institute of Computer Science
Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)
N.Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton,
GR70013 Heraklion,Crete,Greece
Vox:+30(2810)391625
Email: [email protected]
Web-site: http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl
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Crm-sig mailing list
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