SUO: RE: Re: Now What?
Jon et al,
. I agree with your perspective that "an ontology is
like a single data structure". However, I believe you are underestimating
the power of the modern entity and relationship(/process) analytical
processes available. Some of this is covered at www.idef.com
<http://www.idef.com> especially IDEF0 (process) and IDEF1X (data), now
also combined in "Object Role Modelling" championed by Terry Halpin; but
also now IDEF5 for ontologies.
. I suggest what you are calling "a single data structure" is
only a portion of one.
. For example my latest info is that one portion of the US
Department of Defense has a data model that cannot be viewed in a single
diagram, and the multiple perspectives take several walls to display in a
readable form. They have over 10,000 data definitions.
. This perspectives aspect touches on what I have been
referring to as dimensionality so many times in this project.
. I suggest you become familiar with the complexity
accommodated by proper data (and process) modelling, etc. Then you will
answer your concern about its ability to model generic situations. Sure, it
will be an incremental process, just like a young child learning to speak.
But it will grow.
Cheers Graham Horn
National Data Standards Unit
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
================================================
Phone: +61.2.6244.1094
Fax: +61.2.6244.1199
Email: Graham.Horn@aihw.gov.au <mailto:graham.horn@aihw.gov.au>
-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawbrey@oakland.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2001 1:16 PM
To: Schoening, James R CECOM DCSC4I
Cc: Standard-Upper-Ontology (E-mail)
Subject: SUO: Re: Now What?
James Schoening wrote:
>
> All,
>
> Thank you for your votes. Now what?
>
> As I see it, we need to start working on one or more documents
> to have any chance for success. As such, I have contacted those
> with a candidate starter document, to see if they have given thought
> to submitting it as a group work effort. If I overlooked you, please
> let me know.
>
> Until then, let's try to keep some degree of fucus in discussions.
>
> Jim Schoening
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Jim, & All,
I need to try and articulate for the group, in some way or another,
a problem that I have had with the way of working that you suggest,
and perhaps you or somebody can clarify for me why it is so taken
for granted that there can be no other way. I am speaking about
the process of focusing on a candidate document, and somehow
incrementally bootstrapping it up to a real live ontology.
In my way of looking at it, an ontology is like a single data structure,
perhaps an implicit or a virtual one, but still just a one-off schematic.
Every bit of training that I have ever had, whether in math or computing,
tells me to go for the generic process instead of the isolated structure.
I can almost understand the utility of tailoring domain ontologies to the
specific domain, but even there, every significant domain that I have ever
been acquainted with long ago passed the stage of complexity and difficulty
where any sensible community of researchers would even want to think about
building an ontolgy for it by hand, the way that we used to attempt to do
way back in the naive glory days of "expert systems". All of this leads
me to the inexorable conclusion that it is just plain bad methodology to
work on or toward a single, hand-made data structure without putting an
effort into the programs that would have to maintain it, both to create
it from rawer data -- which is where our axioms, concepts, definitions,
and taxonomies ultimately come from, or at least have to be tested on --
and also the software to check it logically and draw inferences from it.
That's about as plain as I can make it. It has always seemed so obvious
to me, as something that I just took it for granted that everyone already
understood, that I still feel just a little embarrassed to have to say it.
When I reflect on this impasse, it occurs to me that maybe different people
just have different ways of working. I got trained in proving theorems and
solving problems. I often try to treat this as the kind of problem-solving
seminars that we used to have in grad school. Maybe that's the wrong model,
but it's one of the best models of collaborative work that I have in memory.
But I get a little unnerved, though, when people pose what they describe as
a "problem" -- I almost reflexively go to work on it -- but then it quickly
becomes clear that they are literally "filtering out" any brand of solution
but the one that they already had in the back of their heads going into it,
and this tends to happen a lot here.
Anyway, just in case there happen to be other members of the group that
share
this attitude toward the work, let me propose that we establish an alternate
or parallel track, one that focuses on "focal" problems, that is, moderately
well-defined or sharply outlined obstacles to progress in building
ontologies
or the software for generating and maintaining them.
Sincerely Yours,
Jon Awbrey
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