Reality, Universal Ontology and Knowledge Systems: Toward the Intelligent World

Being a theoretical groundwork and knowledge base of basal sciences and technologies, real ontology is the heart and soul of all human learning, wisdom and reasoning, unveiling the common nature, mechanisms and meanings of things and their relationships diversified as the key levels and kinds of reality: natural, mental, social, cultural, technological, or informational. As the source science of all knowledge bases and domain theories, it develops the most general theories and representational languages about reality giving the most profound and consistent account of things, entities, or beings, their properties and relationships.

All kinds of science, basic or applied, hard or soft, theoretical or empirical, fundamental or descriptive, natural or humane, to some degree partake in the general theory of entities and relationships as special sciences, or domain specific ontologies. All types of knowledge, theoretical, formal, experimental or practical, presuppose essential, ontological knowledge of things. Implicitly or explicitly, ontological principles can be found among mostly general theories, mostly universal axioms and laws, and in mostly interesting scientific problems. As underlying ideas, ontological categories, classes, concepts, notions, and terms lead the list of the great ideas making the very substance of the grand elemental conceptions. For they are the abstractions by which thought knows the world and minds think things, the terms in which we formulate major principles and facts of reality, the notions in which we make definitions, put fundamental questions, and solve decisive problems. Ontological ideas constitute the very framework of mental contents and cognitive processes as the heart of mental life. They reside in languages, natural or artificial, as the mind in the body, as pungency in pepper; since the syntactic and grammatical categories and semantic classes are inherently tied to world things. Our human language is pervaded with ontological categories, in terms of which we describe the fundamental constituents and properties of reality and explain the complex dynamics of the nonlinear world of things. All great human actions and intellectual achievements, all our rational practice of choice and moral codes are intrinsically guided by ontological rules and principles as primary and unvarying truths of reality.

The large order and broad goal of ontology is to produce the explanatory schemas of all being and reality, giving the guiding principles and rules for a wide variety of special truths and particular facts. The ontological verities come up as the basic laws of reality occupying the highest level in the hierarchy of truths and meanings: mental, logical, mathematical, semantic, verbal, scientific, empirical as well as moral, ethical, esthetic, and religious. So the quest of underlying truths, universal and necessary, is the ultimate goal of the fundamental ontology and ontological theories, aimed to uncover the general knowledge and universal laws applicable to all existence in its basic levels, parts, and domains. These are not all the substantial implications of the general knowledge of reality. Never-foreseen before technological artifacts and engineering systems are lining up beyond the current horizons of knowledge and technology.

With the beginning of the third millennium, unprecedented and profound impacts are increasingly forced not only on human life and culture but also on the dominancy of human beings as the only creatures of sapience and the end-all of evolution. Ontology by means of its radically new ontological technologies and applications underpins the most sophisticated information technology such as large-scale knowledge systems and intellectual technologies as the World Wide Intelligent Web. Providing the unifying reality modeling schemes and languages for intelligent technology, ontology is bridging the real world and the information universe, giving the dynamic world modeling fundamentals, principles, constructs, representations, and algorithms for building ontological technology, a radically new class of intelligent technologies and knowledge systems.

Thus the global ontology as a comprehensive formal abstraction and conceptual model of reality yields a dramatically new type of generic engineering, ontological AI technology, world-centered intellectual systems and knowledge machines. It then becomes the central cause of an unexampled global social transformation, an Intellectual Knowledge Society. That profoundly advanced stage of human societies may be defined as an intelligent civilization (culture) sustained by knowledge infrastructures and machines, where a personal, economic, societal and environmental development is mostly driven by ontological AI technology. Unlike the traditional technologies, it employs the fundamental world knowledge, elemental categories, axioms, rules, laws and principles, for the design and construction of the most advanced information and communication systems and intelligent machines.

To lay down the theoretical foundations of the knowledge society technologies, it is set forth a unifying account of entities and relationships as the reality representation and reasoning (RRR) framework in the form of unified framework ontology or universal formal ontology (UFO), the overlap between universal ontology and fundamental mathematics The encyclopedic world model is developed as Reality Modeling Framework or World Description Framework (WDF) equally applicable for both types of intelligent entities, natural and artificial. Being a unifying framework, a universal theory, a general system, a comprehensive model, and a theoretical account of reality, the UFO maps the corresponding elements and structures of the real world onto the mental representations and operations coded as the computing software classes and processes; thus functioning as the common semantic language both for computers and persons. The unique combination of the ontological and mathematical fundamentals results in the consolidative account of the general classes of things: substances and objects; states and properties; changes, actions, processes, and events; relationships, connections, and associations.

Some fundamental solutions and significant answers coming from the convergence of two master sciences (formal mathematics and substantial ontology) are as follows. The all-entity description framework allows for a reference system of knowledge standards underlying the key concepts of scientific knowledge, the basic constructs of minds, the major categories of languages, the metadata models and reasoning schemas of information systems. Crucially, the UFO also provides a unified (causal) description of the nonlinear world of heterogeneous systems (physical, chemical and biological, cognitive and conceptual, economic and social, engineering and informational) revealing the fundamental principles and rules of their behavior. This presents the entity reference as a representational and inferential framework for the rising generation of intelligent applications equal to reason about different pieces of reality in causal and predictive ways.

As an integrative theoretical system, the UFO makes the largest semantic context of use and meaning within which the major classes and relationship patterns of physical, mental, or cultural worlds as well as the natural language semantics can be described and explained. Again, the natural language is proved to be the most effective representation and reasoning language not only for persons but also for computing machines as able to process and communicate semantic information about the world and its domains in NL forms. This capacity opens up the possibility of linguistic intellectual systems such as encyclopedic intelligences and global knowledge web resources (as the UFO driven Real Web) and so bringing order, meaning, and intelligence to the heterogeneous content of the WWW.

As an original contribution, the book is proposing the unifying account of the dynamic world merging into a single frame the significant elements of various conceptual models, schemas, and data languages such as upper ontologies, the ER extended data models, data integration systems, and Web ontology languages. Representing the content of reality, its meanings and natural language constructions to formal reason of humans and to programming machines will make possible the powerful knowledge technologies and intellectual systems. All is along the strategic lines of automated knowledge society aimed ultimately at an intelligent world:

Reality or the World ? World Knowledge {(Universal Ontology of Everything + Mathematics + Semantics + Science + Real Logic ? Natural Language } ? Applied Ontology ? Informatics and Computer Science ? Ontology AI Technology {Semantic Web ? NL Engineering and Intellectual Technology ? NL Knowledge Machines (systems, applications, agents, robots, software programs, tools) ? Encyclopedic Intelligences ? Real World Web ? Global Intelligent Cyberspace } ? Global Knowledge Society ? Intelligent World (Universe, Reality)

Accordingly, the core subject matter is basically the world, its nature, model, formalization, content, structure, dynamics, meaning, representation, and how it may be effectively represented by human minds and intelligent machines. The world is analyzed as the largest unbounded environment by the agency of ontological representations and mathematical descriptions of its key constituents and relationships. This approach affords to develop the emerging Knowledge Society technology as the real world knowledge systems and applications capable to efficiently represent and reason about everything that exists, changes, and related. The entire research is performed with the basic goal to design a standard ontology (a master schema of things in the world) capable to uniformly organize human knowledge, to create powerful reasoning systems and to secure communication interoperability between diverse species of intelligences, natural and artificial.

To demonstrate the above, the content of the book is arranged into 13 parts. A brief description of each of the parts is as follows.

In Section I, Introduction, we introduce the central meaning and theme of the whole work. The general science of reality, universal formal ontology, together with its theoretical principles and technological applications, is alpha and omega of advanced Knowledge Technology, the fundament of the Intelligent Civilization. The Great Chain of the Intelligent World is traced as: Reality ? World Knowledge ? Knowledge Technology ? Knowledge Society ? Intelligent Reality.

The architecture of reality representation and reasoning systems as the emerging Knowledge Society technology is outlined as:

UFO (fundamental rules, classes, objects, processes, and relationships of reality) + Upper Ontologies (Generic Conceptual Models) + Domain Knowledge Base (Domain Ontologies) + Domain Data Sets + Formal Schema Language + Programming Implementation

A strategic plan for building the Intelligent WWW is shown to follow the developmental stages for the reality-centered ontology technology:

INTELLIGENT WWW: THE WORLD? THE WORLD WIDE WEB ? THE SYNTACTIC WEB ? THE SEMANTIC WEB ? THE PRAGMATIC WEB ? THE ONTOLOGICAL WEB

In Section II, Ways to View the World, it is developed a generic theory of things in the world as a reality representation and reasoning system acting as the world description or reality modeling framework. This part of the book points that the type of ontology relevant to the standard case is the one modeling the universe as the totality of entities organized under few primitive classes which are embodied as a multitude of contingent particulars, objects, properties, occurrences, and connections. In such a global model whatever is and happens can be named an entity or a thing or a being, where all beings, things, or entities are arranged into a comprehensive hierarchy of entity types: the prime classes, their subordinate kinds and innumerable individuals. Here the few fundamental kinds of entity are uncovered, namely, substances, states, changes, and relations, make the principal ontological classes of things in the total reality as well as in its particular domains, realms, regions, and levels. Considered apart from the concrete embodiments and circumstances, the fundamental kinds of things determine the top classes of entity, while all sorts and manner of particular objects, qualities, events, and links make up their instances, cases, and exemplifications. Such an integrating theoretical account provides the highest classes of ontological predicates as the conceptual templates under which all other constructs, notions, terms, and predicates can be ordered and distributed whereby unifying a multitude of domain specific ontologies. This postulates that any entity data framework should first appeal to a formal account of reality, to a consistent and exhaustive classification reflecting the real structure of the world with the inherent ordering of its entities.

In Section III, The World Code, employing the system of symbols and techniques of mathematical foundational theories, vocabulary of higher algebra, lattice theory, set theory, and category theory, we propose an account of the world in onto-mathematical terms of entity variables. As a result, the key assumptions and principles of the Mathematics of Reality (as Real, Ontological Mathematics) are formulated upon which the dynamic formal theory of complex structures and causal systems can be evolved. The chapter indicates that the functional schemas of realities, the categories of the world, the lattice of the classes of entities, the tree of universal properties, and the material equation of things, take priority over the formal constructs as the lattice of theories, the categories of concepts, or the tree of axioms. Also, we sketch the outlines of a new sort of universal mathematics involving ontological principles, definitions, and axioms, namely we talk about the reality-centered, ontological mathematics as the standard model of the world, its distinct levels, realms and domains (natural, mental, cultural, informational).

In Section IV, What Makes Reality, we analyze the fundamental classes of the world. Leaving relationships for a special analysis, we give a formal description of the primary entity types, objects, states, and changes, as the template classes of the universe of discourse about anything and everything. It is proved that to have a well-developed ontology of computable classes, to construct a high quality Web ontology language, we first need to formulate the universal entity framework supporting all the major classes in the world hierarchy of entities. To design such a machine-centric type system requires a formal inquiry into the world's objects, states, and changes, as the classes of ontological predicates specifying the structure of any realms of thing or any knowledge domains and bases. Having in view the close perspective of practical application of the entity type system as the unified modeling language, this part also examines and formulates the distinguishing features of objects, states, and changes, their definitions, axioms, properties, classification, and rules, so that to identify the common rules of reasoning about them. This part indicates that the entire gamut of knowledge about the world can be expressed in a single ontology language common to scientific knowledge, extant upper ontologies, and web ontology languages.

Section V, What Orders Reality, indicates that a relation is a real associative entity, like an interaction or space-time relationship, and that this entity-universal constitutes the vital part of the world description frame and hence the core of any general ontology language. We constructed an axiomatic relational model of reality involving algebraic relation theory. A consistent system of ontological axioms is given as displaying the inherent properties of relational entities, which are as follows:

It’s shown how a universe of relations can be consistently classified, so that the universal taxonomy of relations covers the rich listing of the WordNet relation types running from the part-whole relations to causality to spatial relations to temporal relations to social, human and business relationships to magnitude relations to semantic, linguistic and formal relations.

Section VI, What Organizes the World, presents a universal schema for representing N-ary relations connecting an arbitrary number of kinds of things modeled as entity variables ranging over classes and individuals. It demonstrates how the n-relational ontology patterns should be defined in the web ontology languages, which reduce relations to mathematical functions. In the simplest case of entity-to-entity relationships, all the possible relative orderings are systematically arranged in the Entity-Entity Relationship Matrix (EERM) structure:

Given the nature of correlatives, the relational matrix formula allows for (and generate) a full extent of specific relation types, as in:

In Section VII, What Determines the World, it is emphasized that of all sorts of relationships the relation of causes and effects comes to be the most substantial connection in reality (hence in the universe of discourse); the formal analysis of which, of its nature, structure, and meaning can be given within the general framework of relations in reality. It is established that whatever significant being predicated of the relationship entity is to be also affirmed of causality as its distinguished species. Hence, all the ontological axioms revealing the inherent properties of relational entity apply to causal relations, namely:

While resting on the common theory of relations, there appears the possibility to give a unified account of causality and causation covering the various causal models and perspectives: functional, instrumental, counterfactual, probabilistic, factual, etc.

Section VIII, How to Reason About the World, indicates the following crucial point: as far as the relations are among the prime constituents of the universe of discourse, the knowledge of relations, particularly the ontological relation of causality, constitutes the basic core of world knowing and reasoning. It is shown that any consistent reasoning upon the world, its particular classes, parts and features, is to be founded on: 1. the ontological relationships of substances, states, changes, and relations; 2. the meta-relations of 'parthood' (part-to-whole/whole-to-part relations specified as classificatory relations like subordination, membership and instantiation) and comparison (contrast, identity, resemblance, difference, and analogy). It turned out that the species of reasoning are ultimately determined by the kinds of relationships. As a result, a whole new opportunity opens up, that of ontological reasoning, realistic inference rules, or entity-driven inference system (an organized system of ontological axioms and inference rules) enabling a new class of intelligent artifacts: general reasoning applications and ontology-based search engines.

Section IX, How the World is Signified, is largely about building the human natural language as a common knowledge representation and reasoning language for advanced information systems, AI software, and knowledge technologies and applications such as the upcoming intelligent web and versatile reasoning services. This part of the book discusses how the entity and relationship classes may serve as the ultimate semantic values to the word classes and expressions and sentence constructions. It is thus devoted to a formal ontological analysis of natural language, to the role the world knowledge plays in adjusting natural language for meaningful processing by knowledge machines through establishing the semantic relationships between the entity types and the language units. As far as the world knowledge resides in the natural language as intelligence (mental powers) in the human brain, any rich natural language can be well regarded as a linguistic extension of ontology specifying its verbal classification of things.

In Section X, How to Represent the World, the natural human language (English) is constructed as the most effective RRR language. NL is approached from many sides: physical, physiological, biological, psychological, linguistic, logical, mathematical, and semantic. However, we show that the only one plan of attack may bring out the underlying structure of linguistic knowledge, the fundamental nature and meaning of its parts and lexical units (combining forms, morphemes, words, terms, phrases, expressions, sentences, or utterances). It is that which is based on ontological knowledge and real world semantics. We prove that the number, meanings and relations of word classes (both content words and function words) are tied to the classes of things, to the relationships of their meanings. Or, the syntactic, semantic, and logical structure of language, along with the meaning of its major elements, is ultimately determined by the typology and relationships of the top world things, the referential objects of linguistic signs.

In this part, it is also demonstrated that the language as a collection of expressions can be classified with respect to the principal classes of things: substances, objects, or agents; states, properties, qualities and quantities; changes, actions, activities, events and occurrences; or relations, dependencies, and connections. An onto-semantic analysis of the parts of speech and basic sorts of sentences is performed on the assumption that there are virtually several sorts of words and expressions: entity referring terms; substance naming words; state expressing words; change indicating words; relation signifying words.

As far as there are four distinct name types of things like the names of substances, states, actions, and relations, there are four kinds of adjectives, substantive, stative (expressing states), active (expressing actions), and relational (expressing relationships), and four types of verbs indicating being or existence (to ‘be’ or to ‘exist’), states, changes, or relations. As a consequence, it is confirmed that any linguistic statement asserting that something exists (or does not exist) firstly signifies either substance (stuff and identity) or state (attribute, property, quality, and quantity) or action (change, process, and behavior) or relationship (association, connection, and link); while, secondarily, there come the derivative features like temporality, spatiality, conditionality, or modality.

In Section XI, Natural Language Intelligences, we formulate the principles of designing the NL driven knowledge and reasoning applications, like as NL question/answering systems, domain reasoning engines, representation tools, web search mechanisms, and many other knowledge artifacts, empowered with human language understanding. It is pointed out that most important practical consequence of the WDF comes to be the NL encyclopedic intelligence, titled the Virtual Aristotle Machine (VAM), whose progenitor more than 2200 years ago had envisioned an ‘instrument’ that ‘could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus’ (Aristotle, Politics, section 1.4). The principal component of such a universal ontology language machine is a question-answering system possessing the world knowledge and large lexicon enabling deep causal reasoning in any open domain in terms of human language. It is demonstrated how the basic kinds of things can determine a full set of question classes (and answer types) to meet human inquiry in any knowledge domain. Unlike the demised Halo project of Digital Aristotle (http://www.projecthalo.com/) using the traditional KR&R formal logical technologies for modeling, inference, query encoding, answer justification, the VAM is to be designed by applying onto-semantic techniques involving real world modeling, entity (or content)-based reasoning, NL query, and causal explanation and prediction.

Section XII, The Knowledge Society Applications, examines the critical issues for creating the VAM as a RRR machine: the semantic properties of world representation and reasoning formalism; how the world knowledge base content should be structured; interpretation of the VAM in terms of automata theory as a universal Q&A intelligent transducer, or a general-purpose knowledge automaton subsuming the extant logical models of intelligent agents. The VAM is expected to critically contribute into transforming the Syntactic HTML Web into the Semantic Ontology Web as the next generation of the Internet’s World Wide Web. To tell apart the Virtual Aristotle from the Digital Aristotle as well as from traditional KR&R systems, we focus on the attributes of the VAM as an all-knowing natural language machine. The main thrust of the Part is that to develop the Virtual or Digital Aristotle capable to intelligently extract and process the meanings of symbolic representations, we need to move away from the historical knowledge engineering tools and technologies blindly banking on formal logical languages. Due to the algorithmic (formal) description of natural language within the general ontological meaning framework (as underlying semantic context), we could establish the principles for designing the encyclopedic knowledge and reasoning machines as a new class of intelligent information (computer) systems understanding human natural language. Empowered to learn, acquire, process, accumulate and communicate the world knowledge in NL forms, the Virtual Aristotle Machine might crucially contribute to the advent of Global Intelligent Cyberspace.

In Section XIII, Reality Classification System, the knowledge production line of the UFO is described. The world categorization system is proposed as Universal Standard Entity Classification System, or USECS®, published as a downloadable Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Document, with the memory size of 14.7 MB and the number of words about a million. To flesh out the categorical skeleton, the rich content of the largest online lexical reference, WordNet 2.1, was accommodated according to the UFO’s classification system. Besides, the number of upper taxonomies and web ontologies are included, which can also be encompassed provided that their categorical schemes are properly reclassified.

By its nature, USECS® is nothing else but the world reference system serving as an all-entity classification, the global directory of entities and relationships, or a standard code of basic meanings and definitions supported by common ontological foundation. The UFO product line may carry the following convertible connotations such as World Stock List; World Knowledge Directory (Tree); Universal Scheme of Things; World (Universal) Directory of Meanings; Meaning Searcher, Sense Finder; Human Knowledge Digest, or the Global Nomenclature. The USECS® may be viewed as a general resource of meanings supplying all the essential information about natural, mental, social, cultural, and virtual domains. In its substance, such a general nomenclature, terminology, or language of things is nothing else but the digest (epitome, compendium, outline, abstract, or synopsis) of human learning covering all the key domains of reality, subject areas and fields of study.

In an endeavor to ultimately create the entire reality classification code, the USECS project is particularly committed to digesting, systematizing, and encapsulating human knowledge into a summary scheme retaining the most essential things, so that the frame of human learning can be integrated in the human minds or the global knowledge base of reasoning computing applications.

WHY THIS BOOK IS MUST READING

There are few things that distinguish the book as a valuable and significant reading preferable to others of the same topics, even regardless of some complexness of materials and involution of scientific style. The reasons why readers need to read this book in its entireness are at least three: to learn how to formally describe the world; how to create a single global ontology of anything; and how to establish the ontological and semantic fundamentals of real world knowledge systems.

The loyal reader will be rewarded with the principal answers to the most thrilling and challenging intellectual issues of humanity: whether and how a consistent account of reality can be obtained, which field of knowledge is capable to deal with the whole reality and its formal representation, and how powerful intelligent machines can be brought into existence.

First of all, the reader will discover what is the nature and meaning of the world, existence, or reality, and that the universe is all that exists, physically or mentally, materially or conceptually, the totality of all substances, states, changes and relationships. That there is single underlying ontological dynamic reality coming in diverse forms and levels: physical space-time reality; personal reality; phenomenological reality; commonsense world; semantic reality; social reality, etc.

Second, the reader will let be known that the only science concerned with a comprehensive formal representation of reality, its domains, levels, and constituent entities, which can be effectively used to formulate real world computable models, causal algorithms, and reasoning strategies about the world, is nothing but a global ontology. In the course of reading, the reader will resolve for whether the whole activity is about:
1. the inquiry of reality, its forms, kinds and properties;
2. the general concepts with their formal logical relations;
3. the taxonomy of terms (words) and their semantic relationships.

Thus, the reader can finally decide on one of three perspectives, reality-centric, concept-driven, or name-based: the world ontology (realistic and veridical); the concept ontology (conceptual and notional); the word ontology (linguistic and nominal). And the stakes are rather high. The way we are going to choose might affect the validity of the whole cause of Knowledge Technology and Knowledge Societies.

From the pragmatic view, the reader will find out that emerging knowledge systems and real intelligent technologies, as semantic web applications, thinking machines, etc., are all designed to be using the world representations as ''sensible'' signs (physical signals, codes, or words) in order to process and communicate information about things, processes, facts, rules, laws, feelings, ideas, thoughts, or concepts. Unlike the human brain, in the intelligent machines the symbolic codes signify things directly without the agency of concepts, constructs, notions, categories or abstractions. This means that the nature of mechanical meaning is dependent on the types of symbols and the kinds of things these symbols stand for, and that knowledge machines are devoid of mental experience or meaningful mental constructs. The symbols processed by the mechanical intelligence are the signs of entities and hence they get their significance without the mediation of the conceptions of human intellect. Hence the significance of symbols is rather to come directly from the real entities denoted and their relationships connoted, thus promising to leave off most conceptual troubles so long discommoding human beings.

As the last caution against a possible misreading; to get the essential meaning of the book, the reader should try and avoid mixing the scopes and subject matters of Ontology and Logic, under the headings of which the computing ontology and semantic web activities are currently performed. The real semantics or meanings of any symbolism or notations or signs is defined by ontology; for this is the only knowledge domain studying the Being of Everything which is, happens and relates. If Ontology is a real science, Logic is a formal science, because the latter is concerned only with the formal parts of Discourse about Anything or Everything. Logic considers the elements (the terms, propositions, inferences or syllogisms) of the whole discourse aside from their reference to the world (or their real meanings and significance). As a formal science, Logic deals with the formal patterns of discourse common to all sciences. So, Ontology deals with the matter and content, with the real components of discourse about anything, while Logic is an art, an instrument of intellectual reasoning, at least a formal science, and it has directly nothing to do with reality, real significance or real meanings, a coherent representation of which is the ultimate target of Intelligent Web.

So, the content to read is all about three cardinal things:
1. what is the nature and meaning of reality, the real world, existence, the universe, being, or entity, as all that exists and changes;
2. how it can be described, represented, or formalized by the unifying standard ontology, fit both for humans and machines;
3. how to design real artificial intelligence (general AI, advanced AI, global intelligence, or superintelligence) with a potential to supersede the best human minds.