DOYLC

I wanted to return to the issue of Pluto, which has already been the subject of a number of posts.  The International Astronomical Union (IAU) created a rich array of issues and problems when it undertook a definitional change that resulted in the demotion of Pluto to the class of "dwarf planets". The topic this time is what exactly did the IAU define? I was watching a PBS special on the status of Pluto a few days ago.  It included scenes from a diner where the genial Neil deGrasse Tyson was asking customers what they thought about the new status of Pluto.  The reponses varied, but the issue at hand was about whether Pluto was "a planet".  The diners all thought that they were dealing with the general concept signfied by the term "planet".  Yet there is reason to think they were mistaken. The IAU resolved (see http://www.iau.org/public_press/news/detail/iau0603/ ) concerning the following: "The IAU therefore resolves that planets and other bodies in o...

Stijn commented on my earlier post "What is an Identifying Characteristic?" ( http://definitionsinsemantics.blogspot.com/2011/11/what-is-identifying-characteristic.html ) raising the point that "identification of a thing is dependent on the application".  He lists out things that identify him, and notes that one cannot always be substituted for another.  E.g. a passport cannot always be substituted for a driving license.  It depends on the application, and each application has rules about what can be used as identification.  Stijn asserts that trying to capture all such rules in a definition will create conflict between the parties representing the applications.  So he advises us to separate a definition from capturing such rules. There are a lot of topics compressed into this comment, so I am only going to pick one here.  It is the different classes of identification that should be captured in a definition.  I suggest that these are: Characteristics o...

A couple of days ago I was reading some material on a semantics product and came upon the term "role".  We see role used in data modeling where a primary key migrated into a child entity can be assigned a "role name".  This is the name by which the attribute is known in the child entity, and is useful to disambiguate the same attribute migrated for other relationships between the same two entities. You also hear about "role" in the party model.  Rather than say that Unindicted Broker is a client of Overleveraged Bank, and that Unindicted Broker is a prime broker for Overleveraged Bank, we can say that Unindicted Broker is a party that plays two roles with Overleveraged Bank: (a) client; and (b) prime broker. I think that there are deeper issues here.  We think of a relationship in a data model as a line between two entities.  We cannot allocate attributes to the relationship as we can to entities.  Our notations, methodologies, and tools will not allows it...

Rob brings up a good point in his comment on The Problem of Abstraction in Definitions of Data ( http://definitionsinsemantics.blogspot.com/2011/12/problem-of-abstraction-in-definitions.html ).  He notes that what I am describing is not really abstraction but really a number of different things. Today it seems the term "abstraction" is used in all kinds of situations when talking about data.  For me, it is often difficult to figure out what "abstraction" is supposed to mean in any one of these situations.  I strongly suspect that at least sometimes it does not really mean anything.  Sometimes I suspect it is even used for marketing hype. The entry for "abstraction" in Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology describes how abstraction is filtering out of attributes from an instance or a concept to achieve a particular view of the instance or concept.  Rather poetically the entry describes how a child looks at a body of water and becomes fascina...

Stijn made a couple of sharp points in a comment on the post How is a Definition Different from an Explanation? (Part 1) (http://definitionsinsemantics.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-is-definition-different-from.html).  He notes that there is a need for definitions to be short in certain circumstances, as when a user is scanning through a list.  I think this is a good point.  Users may be more in search mode when they are doing something like this.  They want to know if the definition is close to some target they have in mind.  Obviously, a full definition is not fit for such a purpose. So we might have three levels of definition: (a) a one-liner, suitable for lists; (b) a one-paragraph, suitable for a quick read with some detail - and display on a screen with scarce real estate; and (c) the full definition, as an authoritative reference.  I have no problem with the last one being very long and including pictures - certainly more than half a page.  ...

The issue of the emotive power of terms and definitions is a difficult one.  However, it is never far away, even in data management.  With the recent passing of Kim Jong Il, it seems appropriate to reflect on the political application of terminology.  Below is an excerpt taken from George Orwell's novel "1984" which can be found at the Newspeak Dictionary site www.newspeakdictionary.com.  It deals with how abbreviations can be constructed to achieve certain ends. Admittedly, these are terminological rather than definitional principles, but they are not without interest and certainly have their place.  So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have political significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of s...

I think there is a major problem in not being able to understand and work with different levels of abstraction.  By "abstraction" in this sense I mean one concept system that somehow describes or defines (not merely relates to) another concept system.  I think this is a big problem for definitions in data models. Let us take an example in a retail business such as mortgage banking: Customer Name.  Customer Name exists in the business.  They use it all the time.  Maybe it is sometimes called Borrower Name, but the concept is the same.  This is the Level 1 abstraction. Now let us think of data values in a column in a table that holds Customer Name.  These data values are stored as a code of 1's and 0's.  Of course these bits are rendered into something we can read.  However, this is not the same as the Customer Name in the business.  I worked for a place where they prefixed the name of anyone who had recently left with "ZZZ"....

There are far more concepts than there are terms to describe them.  This leads to the use of a single term to signify more than one concept.  Such terms are known as homonyms.  For instance, the term "table" is used in conversations in business about whether or not to discuss a topic.  Someone may say "Let's table that".  Unfortunately, some people think this means "Let's take that topic off the table", while others think it means "Let's put that on the table".  The differences in interpretation are geographic, with the British thinking it means one thing and the Americans another.  It makes for pretty interesting conference calls on transatlantic projects.  I have managed to forget which side thinks of it which way. So homonyms exist, and we have to deal with them.  But what about technicial terms?  Technical terms are specific to very specialized domains.  It might be thought that the narrowness of the domain would itself guarante...

Today, to be called "sophisticated" is considered a compliment.  In fact, it seems to be a virtue to be aspired to.  Here is an example from: http://www.iexaminer.org/editorial/definition-sophistication-obsolete:   "...I resumed thinking. What exactly is sophistication? The things that we deem to epitomize sophistication—going to the symphony, ballet, dressing up, sipping fine champagne and delighting in witty conversation while daintily snacking on tiny foods, etc.—are they even relevant anymore?"   This was not always so.  In the not too distant past, to be called sophisticated was to be insulted.  Here is the definition of "sophistication" taken from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language(3rd edition, 1766) at http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7124798M/A_dictionary_of_the_English_language :  SOPHISTICATION: Adulteration; not genuineness Sophistication is the act of counterfeiting or adulterating any thing with what is not so good for the s...

I wanted to capture the meaning of these terms because they are very important in dealing with definitions.  The terms have a formal place in logic, and are often encountered in the traditional literature.  Yet it is also fair to say that we probably all use these terms (or their synonyms) quite frequently in analytical work.  Having a good idea of what they actually mean makes them, I think, more useful tools for us. To get understandable definitions, I have used two sources: [1] C.S. Peirce's essay "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1879); and [2] Leibnitz's tract "Reflections Touching Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas" (1684).  This is because each source, in my opinion, is understandable for only two of the terms.   Here we go. Clear : A clear idea is one which is so apprehended that it will be recognized wherever it is met with, and so that no other will be mistaken for it. [1] Obscure : A notion is obscure when it is not sufficient to enable us to recognize the...

David Eddy kindly supplied me with the following military tale: A true story heard around the Pentagon goes like this: One reason the services have trouble operating jointly is that they don't speak the same language. "secure a building" has been found to have the following meanings... Navy would turn off the lights and lock the doors. Army would occupy the building so no one could enter.  Marines would assault the building, capture it, and defend it with suppressive fire and close combat.  Air Force, on the other hand, would take out a three-year lease with an option to buy. I think that we can all appreciate the humor in this, but must recognize that there is something deep and important about it.  But what is the moral in this tale? The story shows that "secure a building" means different things to four different groups.  In each case the term refers to a different concept.  And in each case the concept is clearly defined.  The concepts are all very dist...

In an earlier post I attempted to analyze the definition of "swap" in the Dodd-Frank Act.  I have come across some articles about the definition which are worth looking at to see if they teach us anything about definitions in general. The first is an article from Risk.net, an online magazine about financial risk management, entitled "US power bodies call for clarity on Dodd-Frank “swap” definition" (http://www.risk.net/energy-risk/news/2096674/power-bodies-clarity-dodd-frank-swap-definition).  The article was published on 2011-07-26.  It presents the opinion of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association that Dodd-Frank has defined "swap" too broadly.  The definition would include transactions "long used to manage electric grid reliability" - essentially putting a rural electric cooperative in the same category as Goldman Sachs.  These transactions are used to optimize generation resources to ensure grid reliability.  The industry wants a...

ISO 704 is a standard that has a good deal of relevance for anyone interested in definitions.  I am providing an outline of it here, so its scope can be appreciated.  Substantive discussion of the content of the standard will be provided in future posts.   The standard has been produced by ISO Technical Committee (TC) 37, which is called "Terminology and other language and content resources".  Actually the standard has been produced by Subcommittee SC1 of TC 37, which is known as "Principles and Methods".  ISO 704 existed in a previous version, that was published in 2000.  The present version of the standard is 74 pages long and can be obtained from http://www.iso.org. The abstract of the standard states: ISO 704:2009 establishes the basic principles and methods for preparing and compiling terminologies both inside and outside the framework of standardization, and describes the links between objects, concepts, and their terminological representations. ...

Definitions of concepts are extremely valuable, but are they sufficient for data management?  There seems to be a need for something more - for "data centric definitions".  By this I am referring the definition of a table, or column, or other data object in a database.  A concept definition - a full description of a business concept - is undoubtedly needed for a data object, but there is a strong case that more is required to form an adequate "data-centric definition".  I do not really like calling what I am discussing here "data-centric definitions", because a definition has traditionally been thought of as a property of a concept, not of a data object.  However, the term "data-centric definition" at least focuses us well on the area of interest, so I will keep it for now. Let us first try to discover if there is anything in logic that relates to the topic we are discussing.  And indeed there is. Definition has been part of logic since its incep...

We often use terms without fully thinking out how we are using them - particularly if abstraction is involved.  The other day I was looking at a data modeling tool, and asked a colleague "What did you put into the definition?".  It suddenly occurred to me that I was not talking about the content of the definition, but about the definition field into which I could type the content. After thinking about it some more, I realized that the definition field is a container which we are free to use as we want (at least in the tool I was working with).  So an immediate question is, how do we want to structure what goes into this field (e.g. with section headings) and what metadata about the definition do we want to put in (e.g. what person last updated it)?   Of course, the more sophisticated tools have these separate elements of the definition more explicitly segregated.  The "definition" is a set of smaller containers inside a bigger container. Perhaps this might ...

Today I spoke to the New York ERwin Modeling User Group (NYEMUG) on "Creating Great Definitions".  One question came up, which was why bother crafting definitions at all - why not simply rely on Wikipedia for them?  I suppose it could be any external source, and not necessarily Wikipedia (e.g. the Enterprise Data Management's Semantics Repository).  The way it would work conceptually would be to associate a link to Wikipedia with any term. It might be thought that Wikipedia only deals with common terms, and not specialized technical terms.  However, there are a good number of technical terms that are present in Wikipedia. My first reaction was both "yes" and "no".  "Yes" because it is simply obvious there is considerable value in Wikipedia, but "no" because Wikipedia does not understand the enterprise I work in, which ultimately supplies an enormous amount of context that influences definitions.    I will have to think about this to...

In Part I of this series (http://definitionsinsemantics.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-is-definition-different-from.html), we explored explanation defined as "bringing a mind to an understanding of a topic".   There is, however, another form of explanation, of which Aristotle said "We believe ourselves to know a thing when we are acquainted with its cause" (Posterior Analytics, II C. II para 1). One way to provide this kind of explanation is by arguing from the cause to the effect.  Traditionally this involved using syllogisms where the cause was in the major premiss and the effect was in the conclusion.  E.g. All ellipses show a pattern of positions X; the orbit of Mars shows a pattern of positions X; therefore the orbit of Mars is an ellipse. This form of explanation is very satifying, and it might seem natural to try to incorporate it into definitions.  However, there are reasons not to do so.  First, the above form requires putting the concept to be defined i...

The Dodd-Frank Act is intended to reform the financial system in order to reduce the chance of any future systemic failure.  Obviously, it is very important, and one of the most important parts of Dodd-Frank revolves around swaps.  It may be recalled that lack of understanding about Credit Default Swaps (CDS) was a big part of the financial crisis that began in 2008 - and specifically caused AIG to fail.  CDS, however, are only one species of swap.  Prior to 2008 there had been little regulation of swaps. Before we go further, there is one other piece of background for those unfamiliar with the sausage-making process of US financial regulation.  An Act of Congress is just the beginning.  Agencies of the US government must take the Act and turn it in to rules - usually many rules - and then enforce them.  This means that if there is a problem in the Act, there can be difficulties across many rules. Back to swaps.  The Dodd-Frank definition of "swap...

F.A. Hayek is well known for his battles against Socialism and Keynesianism.  Less well known is his critique of the misapplication of the techniques and language of natural science to the social sciences - an attack on Positivism made eloquently in his 1952 book "The Counter-Revolution of  Science - Studies on The Abuse of Reason" (ISBN 0-913966-66-5).  Hayek termed this misapplication of the natural sciences "Scientism".  In Chapter 3 of the book the Nobel laureate makes some interesting observations on definitions.  Hayek writes:   'Take the concept of a "tool" or "instrument", or of any particular tool such as a hammer or barometer.  It is easily seen that these concepts cannot be interpreted to refer to "objective facts", that is, to things irrespective of what people think about them.  Careful logical analysis of these concepts will show that they all express relationships between several (at least three) terms, of which one i...

In this post we continue to learn lessons from the International Astronomical Union's definition of "planet" in 2006 (http://www.iau.org/public_press/news/detail/iau0603/).  The question tackled here is whether the IAU's definition of "planet" is a quality definition.  After close examination, it seems it is not. Here is the definition: 'A "planet" [1] is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit. [1] The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.'   And here is the analysis of the definition: (a) The definition is not actually of "planet" but of "planets in our Solar System".  This can be mined out of the text of Resolution 5A, which states:   "RESOLUTION 5A The IAU t...

In a previous post (http://definitionsinsemantics.blogspot.com/2011/11/evolution-of-definitions-problem-of.html) the topic of the IAU's 2006 redefinition of the term "planet" was discussed (see http://www.iau.org/public_press/news/detail/iau0603/).  There are many topics relevant to definitions surrounding this event - one of them is the problem of authority.  The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is the organization that came up with the new definition of "planet".  Does this make it an authority?  It does if we define "authority" as "a source of a definition that publishes, and administers, and supports this definition".  However, the term "authority" carries emotional content also.  "Authority" can imply (a) a role of active enforcement; (b) an obligation of obedience upon the body politic.  These implications exist because "authority" is a term that defines many concepts, and some of them have to do with...