Abstraction of levels of abstraction

作者：Ganascia Jean Gabriel^*

来源：Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 2015, 27(1): 23-35.

DOI：10.1080/0952813X.2014.940685

• knowledge level
• level of abstraction
• abstraction
• abstract interpretation
• abstract data type
• philosophy of information
• software engineering
• method of abstraction

The notion of level of abstraction (LoA) is one of the foundations of the Floridi's Philosophy of Information. It also serves for many practical purposes as in information ethics. But the notion of abstraction is not new; it has been given many different meanings in various fields, especially in scientific disciplines and, in particular, in computer science. Our purpose here is to examine the use of abstraction in Floridi's works in conjunction with some of the meanings of abstraction in computer science. The article is divided into five sections. After a general introduction to the Floridi's method of abstraction (MoA) in Section 1, Section 2 revisits Floridi's definition of abstraction and Section 3 gives the different senses of abstraction in computer science. The Section 4 compares them with the Floridi's LoAs and proposes to generalise the Floridi's approach to abstraction using an abstraction of the LoAs, while Section 5 concludes on what we think to be some new arguments in favour of MoA and LoA.

• 出版日期2015-1-2