Throwing Something at the Wall to See if it Sticks

With this article I want to throw something at the wall and see if anything sticks. Let me know what you think. (Image generated by Microsoft Copilot)

For probably the past 10 or 15 years I have been trying to describe something.  The description I am looking for, I would have thought, should already exist.  But, I have been unable to locate a description that is acceptable to me.

What I have found is literally hundreds of potential descriptions most of which were too technical, too incomplete, too complicated to be right, combined different "concerns" or lack  focus, or had some other flaw or flaws.

A natural system is a system that occurs naturally (i.e. no human involvement in the natural system).  A designed system is a system intentionally created by humans (i.e. does not otherwise exist in nature).  A logic system is a type of designed system. A designed system is engineered to meet particular set of needs and can be adjusted or redesigned.

Here is my most current description of what I believe I am trying to describe, a logic system.  (Not an "ontology" which is only part of a logic system, not a "taxonomy", not a knowledge graph which I think is a way of thinking about the logic system.  My description is inspired by the following:

  1. The definition of an "ontology" by OMG which was consistent with the book Ontology Engineering written by Elisa F. Kendall and Deborah L. McGuinness.  This is helpful, but an ontology is only PART of what I am trying to describe and so the definition of an ontology is incomplete so it will not do.
  2. Shawn Riley described a "Good Old-fashioned AI Expert System" and some other descriptions which contribute to my synthesis of an appropriate description/definition.
  3. Graham Berrisford has a lot of good descriptions and ideas; particularly the high level terms provided here.  But I feel this conflates the description of the system and the implementation of the system.
  4. Mike Dillingar's description of a knowledge graph provides very helpful insights.
  5. The many descriptions of PROLOG are very helpful and, in my view; they are the most logical and least technical in many ways.
  6. The discipline of philosophy greatly inspires my thinking and synthesis of this because they invented a lot of this stuff hundreds of years ago.
  7. Atomic design methodology adds to this description.
  8. Dave McComb of Semantic Arts gave me some key, core ideas.
  9. Many other sources have also contributed to my thinking about all this.

This is another iteration of my description (this is just a terse first draft to see if I have my thinking straight):

  • Theory (a.k.a. conceptualization, model, a logic system)
    • Logic statement (fundamentally, everything in a theory is a logic statement; a logic statement is a declarative piece of information)
      • Fact (important logical statements that are known/claimed/deemed to be true)
        • Thing (a.k.a. entity)
          • Primitive thing (a.k.a. atomic thing or simple thing; what I currently call term)
          • Complex thing (structure, model, and terms are currently intermingled in this)
            • Set of primitive things
            • Associations between primitive things (maybe also between complex things)
              • Categorization association (is-a, type; taxonomies do this)
              • Compositional association (has-a)
              • Aggregational association (summation, mathematical)
              • Navigational (parent-child)
              • Simile (things that possess similar qualities but are not the same)
              • Equivalent (one thing is EXACTLY the same as another thing)
            • Property (a.k.a. quality, trait)
        • Instance, individual (don't like these terms)
      • Constraint (a.k.a. rule)
        • Axiom
        • Assertion
        • Restriction

Humans have an innate ability to understand logic.  So, trying to stick as close to the descriptions of logic by philosophy seems like a good thing to do.  What I am also recognizing is that as hard as I try to get this description to be a graph of knowledge; it seems to actually be a hypergraph of knowledge.

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