Dear Robert,
Having collaborated with natural history museum colleagues for some
years and designed a research infrastructure for biodiversity in Greece,
I understand that they normally do not describe the actions of an
individual in a way that information integration on the base of the
individual's animal actions would be needed. They would rather state the
fact that an individual of type A, showed individual behavior pattern B.
They would integrate these data on a type base, and not on an individual
base. We have at FORTH converted Darwin Core data of occurrences of
individuals into CRMsci representations. That had so far covered the needs.
A colleague in Britain had used, I think, CRM for modelling observations
of Caledonian Crow observations. Since these crows do not travel, the
relevant information access and exchange is still on a categorical level.
Migratory birds tracking may be an application, but normally they do not
describe other behavior than move, in which case we can use a Presence
construct for the migration paths.
Our collaboration with NHM showed that they often prefer not to use CRM
for their observation data. In a large European Project, we were forced
to cheat and rename all CRM concepts, so that they appeared under a
"BIO" title.
So, in short, we need an expert that would show us practice of modelling
animal actions individually, and be willing to consider CRM...
Cheers,
Martin
On 10/11/2021 9:13 PM, Robert Sanderson wrote:
Could we clarify what sort of expert we're looking for to move the
discussion forward? In particular, natural history museums seem to be
at the critical intersection between CIDOC and the activities of
animals. I can represent the sorts of documentary evidence from that
side, and happy to reach out to colleagues at other NHMs. So I think
the first aspect is covered, but I question whether we (as modelers of
museum knowledge and documentation) /need/ to understand animal
individuality or behavior in order to take the first step of
describing an animal performing some action. Conversely, my experience
has always been that when there is something to react to, it is much
easier to engage with outside specialists. It is easier to ask for
opinions on something than it is to ask them to help come up with the
interdisciplinary model.
I also don't think it makes sense to model animal actors in great
detail, down to the same level as the differences between classes in
CRMTex for example. The baseline that we need to start with is much
simpler. If there isn't a fine grained concept of animal
individuality, I don't think that means we can't model an individual
animal at a coarser granularity, just that we shouldn't allow the
ontology to describe anything that we don't understand. Even as a
non-biologist, I know without any hesitation that the bird laid the
egg in the nest in the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and that the
herd of dinosaurs created the footprints preserved in Dinosaur State
Park up the road from us. I know that a sheepdog can herd sheep and
makes decisions about which way to run to accomplish the aim of
getting the sheep into the next field (and when I was a little lad
played the part of such a sheepdog for my uncle in New Zealand). How
does the sheepdog know? Does it know that it knows? If we study 100
sheepdogs individually and in groups, what do we learn about
sheepdog behavior? I don't care, and I don't think any other museum
oriented documentation system would either :)
Rob
On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 11:50 AM Martin Doerr <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> 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] <mailto:[email protected]>
Web-site:http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl <http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl>
--
Rob Sanderson
Director for Cultural Heritage Metadata
Yale University
--
------------------------------------
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
_______________________________________________
Crm-sig mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.ics.forth.gr/mailman/listinfo/crm-sig
