Ontology Evolution in Physics

计算机可以通过构建本体来实现自动推理，在本体中表示一些知识和从旧知识中派生新知识的规则。本体论是一种数学形式主义。大多数本体都是为特定的推理任务手动构建的。成功的推理取决于在表征的表达性和推理过程的效率之间达成妥协。如果推理环境或目标随后发生变化，那么推理过程可能会失败，因为本体不再很好地适合其任务。自动推理的许多现代应用需要在不断变化的环境和不断变化的目标中工作。他们的推理系统需要自动适应这些变化。特别是，它们的本体需要自动发展。移除或添加本体论的信念是不够的。有必要改变其底层的形式语言。我们小组在这一新的研究领域中处于领先地位。我们的技术包括诊断现有本体中的故障，然后修复这些故障。在这个项目中，我们建议应用和发展我们在物理领域的技术。这是一个优秀的领域，因为它的许多最具开创性的进步可以被视为本体进化，即改变物理学家看待世界的方式。这些变化往往是由现有理论和实验观察之间的矛盾引发的。这些矛盾、它们的诊断和由此产生的修复通常都被科学史家详细地记录了下来，为我们的技术发展和评估提供了丰富的案例研究脉络。我们面临着一些棘手的技术挑战，包括(a)处理诊断和修复中的大量选择，以及(b)填补某些修复操作中一些未定义的空白。为了解决这些挑战，我们建议将许多诊断和修复操作组合在一起，形成我们所谓的修复计划。我们已经试验了两个这样的修复计划，我们称之为“我的东西呢？”和无常。第一种方法是将一些物质分为可见的、不可见的和完全的物质。我们已经申请了我的东西呢？到各种各样的案例研究，如潜热的发现和暗物质的猜测。第二种方法是让一些东西依赖于一个变量，而之前人们认为它不依赖于这个变量。这个计划正被应用于修正牛顿力学（MoND——暗能量的替代品）和气体定律。我们的建议是通过查看更广泛的案例研究来扩展这个试点研究，开发更多的维修计划，并在案例研究的测试集上评估它们的性能。我们希望表明，一小组修复计划可以成功地解释大量的案例研究。我们将以这项工作为基础，发展一种我们打算应用于物理学领域的本体论进化理论。

A computer can be programmed to reason automatically by constructing an ontology in which to represent both some knowledge and the rules to derive new knowledge from old. An ontology is a mathematical formalism. Most ontologies are built manually for a particular reasoning task. Successful reasoning depends on striking a compromise between the expressiveness of the representation and the efficiency of the reasoning process. If either the reasoning environment or the goals subsequently change, then the reasoning process is likely to fail because the ontology is no longer well suited to its task. Many modern applications of automated reasoning need to work in a changing environment with changing goals. Their reasoning systems need to adapt to these changes automatically. In particular, their ontologies need to evolve automatically. It is not enough to remove from or add to the beliefs of the ontology. It is necessary to change its underlying formal language. Our group has pioneered work in this new area of research. Our techniques involve diagnosis of faults in an existing ontology and then repairing these faults. In this project we propose to apply and develop our techniques in the domain of Physics. This is an excellent domain because many of its most seminal advances can be seen as ontology evolution, i.e. changing the way that physicists view the world. These changes are often triggered by a contradiction between existing theory and experimental observation. These contradictions, their diagnosis and the resulting repairs have usually been well documented by historians of science, providing us with a rich vein of case studies for the development and evaluation of our techniques. We face some tricky technical challenges in (a) dealing with the large number of choices in diagnosis and repair and (b) filling in some undefined blanks in some of the repair operations. To solve these challenges we propose to compose together a number of diagnosis and repair operations into what we call repair plans. We have already experimented with two such repair plans, which we call Where's my stuff? and Inconstancy . The first works by dividing some stuff into visible, invisible and total stuff. We have applied Where's my stuff? to case studies as diverse as the discovery of latent heat and the speculation of dark matter. The second works by making some stuff dependent on a variable on which it was previously thought not to depend. This plan is being applied to Modified Newtonian Mechanics (MoND -- an alternative to dark energy) and to the gas laws. Our proposal is to extend this pilot study by looking at a much wider range of case studies, developing more repair plans and evaluating their performance on a test set of case studies.We hope to show that a small set of repair plans can successfully account for a large number of case studies. We will use this work as a basis to develop a theory of ontology evolution that we intend to be applicable outwith the Physics domain.