JOWO 2017 Ontology Pub Quiz


The quiz was held at the Joint Ontology Workshops 2017, in Bolzano, Italy. A few questions and answers turned out to be debatable; they have not been changed here. Some questions were provided by various contributors (see acknowledgements at the end).
Instructions for this HTML version: toggle 'Answer' to show/hide the answer. It is also available as ppt, which was used for the pub quiz at JOWO17 (in full screen mode).

The rules: There are 42 questions.
1. Where/when can a pointless theory be relevant?

[Answer]
Answer: in spatial ontology and logics
2. Who proposed mereology about a century ago, and may be considered the 'father' of mereology?

[Answer]
Answer: Stanislaw Lesniewski
3. Fill in the blank.
Aristotle: Philosopher
Jesus : ____?

[Answer]
Answer: Prophet. Basically: an instance 'stands to' class/concept/universal, which in this case more specifically means person to a role he played
4. What are in the corners of Ogden's semiotic triangle?

[Answer]
Answer: sign/symbol, thought/reference/concept, and thing/referent
5. What does the the Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) by the Object Management Group (OMG) define?

[Answer]
Answer: The ODM is a family of Meta-Object Facility (MOF) metamodels, mappings between those metamodels as well as mappings to and from UML, and a set of profiles that enable ontology modeling through the use of UML-based tool.
6. Define "fantology"

[Answer]
Answer: (i) ontology of possible worlds and fantastic beings. (informal online definition)
(ii)That the syntax of first order predicate logic is a mirror of reality (from Smith's against fantology)
7. Consider parthood in mereology. Which of the following is NOT a mereological parthood?
  1. Daenerys' heart is part of Daenerys' body
  2. Ramsay's dying is part of the Battle of the Bastards
  3. An amount of Valyerian steel is part of a Eddard Stark's greatsword
  4. Winterfell is part of The North

[Answer]
Answer: An amount of Valyerian steel is part of a Eddard Stark's greatsword correct relation: constitution
8. Which one is the odd one out, and why?
  1. Proton
  2. Neutron
  3. Electron
  4. Chronon

[Answer]
Answer: Chronon The other three are physical objects, whereas chronon is the smallest timeslice (used in several temporal logics)
9. There's trope theory in ontology, with its definition of "trope". But which one(s) of the following also hold for "trope"?
  1. A musical embellishment of texts
  2. Archaic geometry term for a tangent line or plane
  3. Cliché
  4. Anglicization of troupe (group; e.g., of dancers)

[Answer]
Answer: 1-3
10. What is the goal of guerrilla ontology?

[Answer]
Answer: "to expose an individual or individuals to radically unique ideas, thoughts, and words, in order to invoke cognitive dissonance, which can cause a degree of discomfort in some individuals as they find their belief systems challenged by new concepts" (according to Wikipedia)
11. If parthood is interpreted as set inclusion, what is the set-theoretic relation corresponding to overlap?

[Answer]
Answer: Intersection
12. The Metaphysics of Quality was introduced in which popular fiction novel?
  1. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
  2. Crime and punishment
  3. The hunger games
  4. The revenge of Gaia

[Answer]
Answer: Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
13. What is "gunk"

[Answer]
Answer: it refers to a domain in which everything can be divided for ever into smaller and smaller parts As an aside: introduced by David Lewis in: Parts of Classes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991)
14. Given the principle of unique unrestricted composition (to the effect that every plurality of things has a unique fusion), which of the following additional principles will suffice to yield a complete axiomatization of classical mereology?
  1. antisymmetry of part
  2. transitivity of part
  3. weak supplementation

[Answer]
Answer: weak supplementation
15. "mothership" is considered (rightly or wrongly) a conceptual blend. What is its etymology?
  1. 20th century, popularised in SciFi, referring to the large space ship and the small explorer and escape pods
  2. 1890s, from the whaling trade when small, fast ships were used to chase and kill whales and the dead meat from several boats was then brought back to the larger slower ship for processing and storage
  3. 1490s, from Columbus' travels taking small rowing boats to go ashore the new world more swiftly, avoiding getting the big cross-Atlantic vessel stuck in sand banks

[Answer]
Answer: 2
16. Who's the author of "Gödel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid"?
  1. Kevin Mulligan
  2. Douglas Hofstadter
  3. Primo Levi

[Answer]
Answer: Douglas Hofstadter
17. When was the earliest published occurrence of the word "ontology"?

[Answer]
Answer: 1606, in Jacob Lorhard "Ogdoas Scholastica"
18. Which of the following does not exist?
  1. Paleontology
  2. Nontology
  3. Zoontology

[Answer]
Answer: Zoontology As an aside: "nontology" in the urban dictionary: "Nontology is the negation of ontology or the possibility of our mind to understand by logic the ultimate nature of things.". It is also a band on soundcloud.
19. Is a tornado an object, a process, or an event?

[Answer]
Answer: It could be any of these depending on the point of view from which it is described - lots of scope for interesting discussion there!
20. What does RCC stand for?

[Answer]
Answer: Region Connection Calculus
21. Sets have members as their most basic constituents. What is the counterpart to that in mereology?

[Answer]
Answer: Atom
22. Money. Which of the following are primary and which are secondary/derivative? method-of-payment, store-of-value, medium-of-exchange, unit-of-account?

[Answer]
Answer: store-of-value & unit-of-account are primary, medium-of-exchange & method-of-payment are derivative
23. Which of the following relation(s) really do require a temporal modality to represent its meaning fully?
  1. x precedes y
  2. x is derived from y
  3. x is an immutable part of y
  4. x participates in y

[Answer]
Answer: 1-3. Immutable part too: x is an essential part of y for as long as it is an instance of X. Participation not necessarily, though it could have some duration added to it.
24. Which of the following is/are anti-rigid?
  1. Person
  2. Student
  3. Banana
  4. Divorce of a couple

[Answer]
Answer: student, divorce (the couple were at some point necessarily not in a divorce, being married--one may argue)
25. Does the mereological principle of strong supplementation imply the extensionality of parthood?

[Answer]
Answer: yes
26. Can all pub quizzes be interesting?

[Answer]
Answer: no. if all pub quizzes are interesting, and if being interesting requires some original feature, then relative to the property of being interesting, all pub quizzes would appear to be uninteresting. Which is to say: boring.
27. You need to represent in an ontology the concept land-locked country (e.g., Switzerland, Lesotho). Which theory (logic and/or Ontology) will help you do that?

[Answer]
Answer: (mereo)topology
28. According to which foundational ontology is Death an achievement?

[Answer]
Answer: DOLCE
29. Is the Ontology Quiz a continuant, an occurrent, both, or neither?

[Answer]
Answer: depends... (i) The quiz qua collection of questions to be answered, which is a continuant; (ii) The actual event on Wednesday evening when the questions are posed and people attempt to answer them, which is an occurrent.
30. No Italian pizza has fruit as topping. Which of the following is/are (a) Italian pizza(s)?
  1. Pizza Hawaii
  2. Pizza margherita
  3. Pizza bianca romana ('white roman pizza')

[Answer]
Answer: Pizza bianca romana, because pineapples and tomatoes are fruits
31. What is DOL?

[Answer]
Answer: The Distributed Ontology, Model and Specification Language
32. Can an identity criterion be based on the identification of an essential part?

[Answer]
Answer: no, unless the essential part comes with a clear identity criterion itself. Identity criteria are based on properties, not the on the identity of other entities on the pain of regression.
33. What is the proper term in ontology of those objects that in natural language are generally referred to with mass nouns?

[Answer]
Answer: stuff, amount of matter That is, those uncountables, or only countable in quantities; e.g., gold, water, mayonnaise, beer
34. Person transplants. If as donor, you can make your brain available to anyone interested and it costs you $10k, but as receiver requesting a new brain you can get $10k from the clinic, then what does that say about the notion of the location of the self?

[Answer]
Answer: based in the brain, not the body.
35. The Distributed Ontology, Model and Specification Language (DOL) is a specification by:
  1. IEEE in 2014
  2. Not yet approved
  3. OMG in 2016
  4. W3C in 2015

[Answer]
Answer: OMG in 2016
36. A methodology to build ontologies that is based on evolving prototypes is:
  1. CYC method
  2. METHONTOLOGY
  3. ON-TO-KNOWLEDGE

[Answer]
Answer: METHONTOLOGY
37. Relations/relationships are ontologically 'standard view', 'positionalist' or 'anti-positionalist', according to Kit Fine. Which commitment is taken in First Order Predicate Logic?

[Answer]
Answer: standard view
38. Who is credited with saying "... a secret and ardent stirring within the frozen chastity of the universal."?
  1. Slavoj Zizek, continental (and popular) philosopher
  2. Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize laureate
  3. Tyrion Lannister, character in GoT
  4. Mr. Spock, character in Star Trek

[Answer]
Answer: Thomas Mann, referring to organic life
39. The Kingdom of Lesotho (a country) is entirely surrounded by South Africa. Which relation from which theory do you need to represent that?

[Answer]
Answer: debatable. non-tangetially proper located in (in mereotopology, or with some RCC or the like), or argue that it's a hole in SA (it being the doughnut) so then a theory with cavities and holes (so, spatial stuff)
40. In analysing natural language for ontology, what is the difference between a statement that uses 'used to be' vs 'could have been'?

[Answer]
Answer: former for temporal, latter for counterfactuals
41. What kind of entity is Software, and why?
  1. endurant/continuant, for it is the written code
  2. perdurant/occurrent, for it is only software when the code is executed
  3. an abstract entity, because it represents an idea
  4. neither. because...

[Answer]
Answer: I don't think there's agreement about that yet, so almost any logical argument would be acceptable as correct answer.
42. Do mountains exist?
  1. Yes, because humans refer to landforms such as "Mont Blanc" and "Mount Everest" in their discourse and everyday conversation.
  2. No, because all mathematical representations of terrain do not need the concept of a "mountain".
  3. It depends on the definition of "exist".

[Answer]
Answer: Mountains may be necessary concepts of a human description of landforms, but are not required in mathematical or computer representations of terrain.

Acknowledgements:
The idea and questions are based on the ISAO 2016 pub quiz, whose questions had been set by (in order of number of questions provided): Maria Keet, Achille Varzi, Antony Galton, Alessandro Artale, Gilberto Camara, Laure Vieu, and Roberta Ferrario.
For JOWO17, it was substantially updated and extended with additional questions set by Julita Bermejo and Maria Keet