Re: [protege-user] [EXT] Modeling Beliefs in OWL?

Excellent, thanks.  I sat in on a couple of graduate philosophy seminars on
Theory of Mind that Searle had when he was still at Berkeley. Really
interesting although we didn't always agree. I'm kind of a fan of Chomsky
and he... isn't. But I respect his work quite a lot and will check that
out, sounds very promising.

On Tue, Jan 28, 2025 at 5:02 PM Michael Denny <[email protected]> wrote:

> Michael,
>
>
>
> You might find something useful in the work of Rinke Hoekstra (1) who
> years ago developed design patterns making clever use of OWL 2 DL features
> to model relations inspired by Searle’s social reality concepts.  These I
> believe were included in the LKIF Core legal ontology and include one that
> is extended to represent a person’s attitude toward a proposition or belief
> in a brute fact, etc. in a given context.  Here a ‘counts_as’–like relation
> linking the concepts is functionally reified in that context.  Worth
> checking out.
>
>
>
> (1)  Representing social reality in OWL 2. Rinke Hoekstra 2010
> <https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-614/owled2010_submission_29.pdf>
>
>
>
> Mike
>
>
>
> *From:* protege-user [mailto:[email protected]] *On
> Behalf Of *Michael DeBellis
> *Sent:* Saturday, January 25, 2025 2:00 PM
> *To:* User support for WebProtege and Protege Desktop
> *Subject:* Re: [protege-user] [EXT] Modeling Beliefs in OWL?
>
>
>
>
>
> Now, I challenge you to use your approach to model the beliefs I just
> expressed!
>
>
>
> There is no doubt that there will be many propositions that I won't be
> able to model in OWL. The ontology I'm building can still be very useful
> without such a model. The open question is can I at least model basic
> beliefs like "Climate Change is a real phenomena that is to a significant
> extent caused by human use of fossil fuels" or "Decreased use of fossil
> fuels will destroy the economy". Maybe not but maybe.
>
>
>
> Regarding your subsequent exchange with Sampson, I do have to wonder
> whether OWL is the right language to express beliefs rigorously
>
>
>
> It certainly isn't the best language. But again, modeling beliefs isn't
> the most important thing I'm trying to do. The most important thing I'm
> trying to do is build a tool that integrates a knowledge graph and
> ChatGPT to answer questions about climate obstruction and green washing,
> provide links to appropriate papers, and other documents such as pages on web
> sites that are databases of litigations regarding deceptive climate
> advertising <https://climatecasechart.com/> If I can model simple beliefs
> that is so much the better but not essential. Any alternatives that I've
> seen don't have the kind of scalability and tool support that OWL does so I
> would rather have OWL and no beliefs rather than some language where I can
> model say a thousand documents but then hit performance limits. One of the
> other things I've been looking into is using OWL and SHACL as semantics for
> metadata in a data lakehouse which is one reason I like this example, there
> is a ton of data out there so this could be useful to people doing work in
> climate change as well as a demonstration of a new approach to OLAP using
> semantic technology and LLMs rather than databases like Google Big
> Query as people do now.
>
>
>
> Regarding Samson's question: I didn't give the correct answer for why I
> think a Belief concept is required rather than just a believes property.
> That is that Beliefs have additional properties besides their propositions.
> E.g., people change their minds. For example I used to believe that "George
> Washington chopped down a Cherry tree but then couldn't lie about it when
> asked if he was responsible" (when I was very young) I know that's just a
> story now. Also, an individual's beliefs have a structure that is not
> completely dependent on the proposition. The fact that you don't see stars
> in video of the men walking on the moon is taken by conspiracy theorists as
> evidence that the moon landings were faked. But people who know astronomy
> know that it has to do with how cameras work and how bright the surface of
> the moon is. There is so much light from the sun that the camera has to
> close its aperture to be very small and hence can't detect the faint light
> of the stars.
>
>
>
> Given that we’re not going to have an alternate language for expressing
> ontologies with modal logic (would that even be an ontology?)
>
>
>
>  I don't care about questions like "would that even be an ontology?". I
> care about making something that works and is scalable and takes advantage
> of the RAG integration between ChatGPT and knowledge graphs. If it turned
> out that building the whole model in SHACL or Neo4j was the best approach,
> I would do that. I happen to think that OWL is best but I want to use other
> technologies as well. E.g., AllegroGraph has an implementation of Prolog
> and tools for reasoning about time and spatial information that might be
> useful and I think the geographic reasoning is in RDF and SPARQL not OWL.
> In fact time and units are two other things I'm thinking of. In the past
> I've modeled both of those explicitly in the ontology but I'm concerned
> that may not scale up and I've been looking at handling both via code
> rather than in the ontology. So there is no question a significant amount
> of reasoning or what people used to call "business logic" will be in the
> code, not all in the ontology.
>
>
>
> Thanks for the feedback, it helps to talk these things through before
> building something.
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Michael
>
> https://www.michaeldebellis.com/blog
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 24, 2025 at 7:25 AM Wartik, Steven P "Steve" <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> Michael,
>
>
>
> I believe that “Proposition” more accurately expresses your intent than
> “Fact”. I also believe “State” would be misleading, because I believe most
> people interpret “State” to mean something that exists, has existed, or
> will exist, not something that might exist or never existed.
>
>
>
> Now, I challenge you to use your approach to model the beliefs I just
> expressed!
>
>
>
> Regarding your subsequent exchange with Sampson, I do have to wonder
> whether OWL is the right language to express beliefs rigorously. I have,
> from time to time, needed to model beliefs. I have used the Common Core
> Ontologies <https://github.com/CommonCoreOntology/CommonCoreOntologies>
> and have expressed beliefs as Information Content Entities, which is weak.
> Well, my approach is a little more complicated than that (details on
> request), but my point is that OWL doesn’t facilitate useful reasoning
> about beliefs – at least, I haven’t figured out a good approach to modeling
> beliefs in OWL.  In every approach I’ve seen, calling something a “belief”
> requires an interpretation external to the ontology. Given that we’re not
> going to have an alternate language for expressing ontologies with modal
> logic (would that even be an ontology?) any time soon, I ask: How will you
> make users of your ontology aware of the additional interpretations they
> must apply?
>
>
>
> Steve Wartik
>
>
>
> *From:* protege-user <[email protected]> *On Behalf
> Of *Michael DeBellis
> *Sent:* Thursday, January 23, 2025 7:17 PM
> *To:* User support for WebProtege and Protege Desktop <
> [email protected]>
> *Subject:* Re: [protege-user] [EXT] Modeling Beliefs in OWL?
>
>
>
> Steve, good point. By fact I didn't mean to imply it is true, merely that
> it is a state of the world that is possible. But I agree calling it a Fact
> is misleading. I actually think in the previous work where I used this
> model I called it a State. The reason I didn't use State is I want this to
> be understandable to social scientists and I'm not sure they would know
> this meaning of State. I also used the term Proposition in previous work
> and I think that might be the best here but definitely not Fact. Another
> option is Statement but that implies someone said it. I just looked up
> Proposition on Wikipedia and I think that is the proper term rather than
> Fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposition Let me know if you
> disagree, thanks for the feedback.
>
>
>
> Michael
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 23, 2025 at 1:35 PM Wartik, Steven P "Steve" <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> Michael,
>
>
>
> I am curious about your first approach. How do you adjudicate what
> individuals are members of class Fact? I hardly need point out the
> practical difficulties in this day and age. And for that matter, what does
> it mean for an individual to be a member of class Fact? Especially in the
> context of your Belief class. If *f* is a Fact, *b* is a Belief, and *b*
> hasFact *f*, then what’s the point of calling something a belief if *f*
> is accepted to be truth?
>
>
>
> On reflection, it seems to me that a member of class Fact is, in your
> interpretation, something that someone believes to be a fact, independent
> of whether or not it actually is a fact. Is that correct? If so, “Fact” is
> kind of a misleading name.
>
>
>
> The approach may get you into trouble if you try reasoning. I can see a
> knowledge graph simultaneously containing the following two beliefs:
>
>
>
> 1.      Belief 1: Person 1 thinks the average global temperature has
> risen 1.5° since 1990.
>
> 2.      Belief 2: Person 2 thinks the average global temperature has
> risen 0.5° since 1990.
>
>
>
> To express this according to your approach, you’re going to have pairs of
> triples independent of the beliefs:
>
>
>
> 1.      Fact 1: The average global temperature has risen 1.5° since 1990.
>
> 2.      Fact 2: The average global temperature has risen 0.5° since 1990.
>
>
>
> Because reasoners don’t know about your Belief class, they might choke on
> something like this. It’s hard to say without a full model. Just something
> to keep in mind as you proceed.
>
>
>
> Steve Wartik
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* protege-user <[email protected]> *On Behalf
> Of *Michael DeBellis
> *Sent:* Thursday, January 23, 2025 3:04 PM
> *To:* User support for WebProtege and Protege Desktop <
> [email protected]>
> *Subject:* [EXT] [protege-user] Modeling Beliefs in OWL?
>
>
>
> *** This email originated outside of IDA. Please verify that you recognize
> the sender and know the content is safe before proceeding. ***
>
>
>
> I'm developing an ontology based on an informal model created by some
> social scientists to model Climate Obstruction and Green Washing. I'm
> starting with the Gist upper model (but to the extent I understand Gist, I
> think the following question is  bit more theoretical than what they
> typically model).
>
>
>
> One thing I want to model is beliefs. The problem of course is that since
> Gist is logical it can't handle axioms that contradict each other and
> different people believe contradictory things  I've thought of two ways to
> do it and I'm interested in any feedback people have.
>
>
>
> Also, while the eventual knowledge graph will be large (millions of
> triples at least) the size won't come from beliefs. E.g., I'm not going to
> need to model thousands of different belief systems. I'll be using
> individual people as examples and perhaps also groups of people (e.g., the
> goal of an Exxon PR program is to convince the AmericanConsumer that
> decreased use of fossil fuel will be bad for the economy). Both Person and
> Organization are subclasses of Agent and Agent is the domain for believes.
>
>
>
> Approach 1). Reified triples. Create a class called Fact. Create object
> properties hasSubject, hasPredicate, hasObject, where each property's
> domain is Fact and the range is undefined. Then a Class called Belief with
> an object property hasFact. A belief consists of one or more facts. So to
> model Michael thinks Cat1 is on Mat1 create a Fact (Cat1OnMat1) with
> subject = Cat1, Predicate = isOn and object = Mat1. Make a belief object
> that consists of this fact Cat1OnMat1Belief and an object property believes
> and the triple Michael believes Cat1OnMat1Belief. You can assert a Fact is
> true with a simple Python function or even just a sparql query that gets
> the triple values and asserts them.
>
>
>
> Issues: Have to pun all the values for hasPredicate since those need to be
> properties. I've had bad experiences when using lots of puns. Honestly, I'm
> not sure if the problems are from AllegroGraph, Protege or using them
> together (which I do all the time without problems except when I have lots
> of puns). I've never spent enough time to figure out what the specific
> problem(s) are because I found whatever was going wrong I could make it go
> away by using annotation properties and no puns...  actually another option
> would be to make hasPredicate an annotation rather than object property.
>
>
>
> Approach 2): Use named graphs and only do reasoning within each graph.
> This seems simpler. So for each Agent's beliefs we would just have a named
> graph called MichaelBeliefs, AlansBeliefs, etc.
>
>
>
> Issues: How to model the connection between an Agent and their Beliefs.
> Since I don't think OWL understands what a named graph is because its an
> RDF concept not a logical concept. I think I could create an annotation
> property that points from the Agent to each named graph.
>
>
>
> I was leaning toward 1 which I've done before (on a very small scale) but
> after talking to a colleague I'm leaning toward 2.
>
>
>
> Interested in any critique, feedback, other ideas and/or pointers to
> relevant papers.
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Michael
>
> https://www.michaeldebellis.com/blog
>
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