What is MOM?

MOM is the acronym for "Model of Meaning". It is founded on one basic assumption, that a notion always consists out of simpler notions or, alternatively, out of raw data -- like "light sensored"

Like ontologies, the MOM building of notions is represented as a graph, a heavily wired network, where the notions make the nodes and the edges indicate which notion consists out of which other notions. Other but common ontologies, MOM avoids edges injecting knowledge which is unreachable to a system that gets the network as its knowledge base. For example, in thesauri there are edges like "this is an antonym to that" and "this a broader term to that". And most of the thesaurus edges (called "relationships") are abstracting. So, for example a dog node may be immediately attached to a animal node. But that implies: The system cannot sense why the dog may be an animal. It fully depends on the humans who foster the network. The same in the case of antonym or even more sophisticated relationships. -- As far as I know, most ontologies tend to make use of such knowledge injecting edges.

Related to this, there is one another big difference between MOM and common classifications/thesauri (also known as "controlled vocabularies"): MOM builds upon a slightly different definition of the term "notion".

Usually, notions are thought of as a triangle of term, item, and thought of the item. MOM does not focus on the item, nor does it have any interest on the terms. (Different cultures have different terms for the same items, hence why care?) Thus, the MOM nodes in fact don't represent notions but just thoughts of items. That makes a huge difference: Relying on the traditional definition of notions, a classification or a thesaurus can validly define a motor vehicle to consist of e.g. a set of wheels, engine, body (amongst others), but validly it can not define a van to consist of a motor vehicle and other parts, since a motor vehicle, simply, is not a part of a van. MOM, on the other hand, ignores the chance that a physical item might be attached to a notion. Hence, yes, part of a van may be a motor vehicle.

This insight allowed to drop the dominating kind of relationship of traditional controlled vocabularies, the abstraction relationship. Which MOM dropped in fact. Which led to a single remaining kind of edges: The partial one. Questions?

      
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