Post by Martin Doerr (17 February 2025) -- personal communication
Continuing the discussion about issue 672, during which I have been absent,
I'd like to propose several answers to the question as appeared in the minutes:
"If E13 Attribute Assignment is only meant to be used for reification constructs" and the proposal to cut off subclasses of E13.
Issue 672 was about the quantification of the properties of E13, in order to remove ambiguity of reference between the three properties, as well as for its subclasses, and not about addressing the meaning of E13. Since the above question about the meaning of E13 has nothing to do with the ambiguity of reference between the three properties, I understand this as a new issue, which should be discussed after resolving 672.
I propose to define the above question as a more general issue:
A) What is the meaning of E13 ?
B) How to document a statement in an attitude neutral to its truth or to being believed by anyone.
C) How to refer to a property instance independent of its place in the model.
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My understanding (as our homework) is the following:
Firstly, I'd like to point you to my elaborate justification of the relation of reification with proposition sets and E13, as attached.
To my understanding,
a) Reification is an encoding feature, and not an ontological entity. It provides a URI to a property instance.
This is exactly what I17 One-Proposition Set does. It allows for declaring a URI for a property instance, either by three properties or an encoding string. It is therefore functionally adequate, and can be used as range by any new property. It answers point C above, if CRMinf is used.
b) E13 is an activity. As such, it embeds a reification pattern, but that does not mean that it covers all possible senses to refer to a property instance. That would be a co-implication.
In particular,
Following the scope note,
"This class allows for the documentation of how the respective assignment came about, and whose opinion it was. Note that all instances of properties described in a knowledge base are the opinion of someone. Per default, they are the opinion of the team maintaining the knowledge base."
As such, it was not meant to be neutral to the question of justification by the Actor carrying it out. Also, implementation guide lines discussed in the past recommended to materialize the property referred to by E13 in the Knowledge Base, if its type is part of the model used.
c) The subclasses of E13 must be regarded as part of the intended meaning. The CRM is developed bottom up. E13, beyond the precision of its scope note to capture its meaning, was historically designed as generalization of its known subclasses in CRMbase.
d) The proposal to cut off the subclasses is:
- non-monotonic, as it invalidates queries about E13, i.e., constitutes a major revision.
- in contradiction to the original definition
- leaves the current subclasses without generalization, i.e., would require to reinvent their generalization
e) We have recently decided that E13 IsA I1 Argumentation, which would become invalid as well.
Therefore, I have the following questions: Why should E13 only be meant to be used for reification constructs? And who is the Actor, the documentalist or in the documented fact?
As real underlying reason, I regard B) above:
How to document a statement made by someone in an attitude neutral to its truth or to being believed by anyone, in CRMbase or using CRMinf as well?
Obviously, there are several solutions to that:
1) The idea to redefine E13, cut it off from its subclasses and I1, and create a new superclass tin CRMbase to its previous subclasses, and put that under I1 or not.
2) It would be much simpler and monotonic, to declare a new superclass of E13 to cover the meaning thought about in the discussion.
3) Any statement, including a reified property instance, is an instance of E89 Propositional Object, created by an instance of E65 Creation. Used with E65, there is no other commitment to a related reality by the documentalist, nor questioning any possible related reality.
4) I16 Meaning Comprehension in CRMinf provides precisely the mechanism to analyzing a text in terms of formal propositions, without taking a position about its truth or whose opinion it was.
Summarizing, I regard solution 1) not as necessary or effective, and 3),4) and I17 as sufficient.
That leaves the last question A) open:
What is the meaning of E13, and how is it justified to be a kind of I1 Argumentation?
I regard the following:
a) I1 Argumentation is more general than E13 in the sense that it refers (1) to whole sets of propositions and (2) to varied belief values. This is what the new version of CRMinf describes.
b) I1 Argumentation, regardless scope note, is designed to be superclass of Observation (Doerr et al. 2011), i.e., "I have seen it"is taken as Argument.
c) Similarly, E13 is superclass of: E14 Condition Assessment, E16 Measurement, E17 Type Assignment. Clearly, these classes are observation based and therefore clearly fall under the intention of I1.
d) E15 Identifier Assignment has different semantics, because it brings about a new state. I argue, that even identifier assignment follows a justifying procedure with premises, such as uniqueness etc.
e) The more general case of "name use" activity is referred to in CRMbase in the introduction and as example under E7, but was not considered under E13.
In case we regard the scope note of I1 Argumentation to be too restrictive to cover E15, we can relax the scope note of I1, which is monotonic.
Best,
Martin