OntologySummit2007 Survey/ResponseAnalysis

Latest Version:http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OntologySummit2007/survey/wip/ResponseAnalysis-question3-20070421.html
Date Issued:2007-04-21T17:07:21Z
Status:Work in progress
Description:OntologySummit2007 Survey/ResponseAnalysis Question 3

Ontology Value

CommunityAnswer
Formal ontology communitiesMachine interpretable semantics comparable to human conceptual level. Semantic interoperability, integration, search, classification, guidance and adherence to human domain and upper/foundational ontology models. [Leo Obrst]
It is central to the constituency. By the way, I think the problem comes in two parts: 1. The tools of the trade (logic and representations) 2. What is represented - the ontology content, so things like 3D and 4D (I would call this philosophical ontology) [Matthew West]
a topic for research [Patrick Cassidy]
large [Alan H. Bond]
Representing meaning for the purposes of interoperability between complex systems. [Charles Turnitsa]
fosters cross-disciplinary communication between human and computer agents; fosters cross-disciplinary data integration and data access; promotes information-based reasoning [Barry Smith]
support for semantic integration and automated reasoning [Michael Gruninger]
Semantic Web communitiesprecise specification, knowledge base for intelligent applications, machine/system interoperability, human interface/communication [Doug Holmes]
conceptual reliability and consistency [Paola Di Maio]
http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it/21abreast.htm [Leonid Ototsky]
Linguistic communitiesOntology and education [Jorge Enrique Saby Beltran]
Topic Map communityGreat value. Ontology engineering offers expert opinions on how the world is wired up. [Jack Park]
Web 2.0 communitiesdisambiguation of text strings in search & automatic aggregation generation of navigation between content on related topics control of templates based on content type [Karen Loasby]
enable collaboration between participants with a shared vocabulary [lisa dawn colvin]
Ontology is a dirty word in our constituency. [Gene Smith]
Ontology is an enabling technology for data sharing and application integration. It enables "semantic mashups" -- building on others in the Web ecosystem to create new value. [Tom Gruber]
Focus on small group ontology provides structure for better understanding of the breadth of terms [Thomas Vander Wal]
Thesauri community1. Modeling business rules
2. Modeling decision trees
3. Reasoning over faceted taxonomies/thesauri - Ontologies are good at mapping terms between facets. For example, delivering appropriate content based on someone's background would require a mapping between two facets,
(1) a person's skill, and (2) content type.
4. Customizing semantic relationships - Taxonomies are constructed using the simple semantic relationship of hierarchy. Often, there is a need to express a different kind of term relationship. This special relationship is an ontological relationship and could be considered a Business Rule in some cases. These should be used conservatively. Simple vocabularies and hierarchies are the easiest, most maintainable solution. [Paul King]
Taxonomy communitiesIt presents the opportunity to formalize and standardize what is current practice. Also, it provides the opportunity to integrate into a larger context many different kinds of practices. More importantly, it offers the potential to do something more intelligent with an integrated foundation. [Denise Bedford]
Applications Development, Software Engineering and Information Model communitiesReduction of cost and risk in application development. Harvesting of sunk value in legacy systems. [Chris Partridge]
At the moment, not much. The term itself and the myriad of ways that it is used seem to alienate my constituency. The value I think it *could* bring is to unite the functional benefits of AI/KR processes with existing database and data structuring methods. In-and-of-itself "ontology" is just special data structuring that facilitate reasoning and other AI processes. Uniting this with real data would be of great value. [William Burkett]
Method for building wide interoperation at the level of a common semantic (real world) standard where narrow sub-communities extend the ontology locally [Sean Barker]
It finally validates what I have been doing for a long time as a "semantic data modeler". [David Hay]
Ontology engineering is a better level of abstraction for dealing with issues than Java or XML [Francis mccabe]
It takes the complexity, confusion and guess work out of ontology construction by allowing the Mark 3 platform to self-build and organize ontologies into high fidelity knowledge base products. [Dennis L. Thomas]
System Architecture communitiesA common set of terms and processing rules. [Michel Biezunski]
Biomedical communitiesOntologies are used for improved patient care, health services billing, public health records/statistics, indexing and cataloging biomedical literature, basic research, clinical research, and health services research. [Ken Baclawski]
1) A reference for entities of biomedical interest (e.g., for indexing and annotation purposes)
2) A source of relations among biomedical entities (close to knowledge bases) [Olivier Bodenreider]
- Information integration from disparate health care systems
- providing unified view of data
- Enabling 'semantic' clinical queries for infection control, clinical research, data warehouse etc.
- Automated classification and maintenance of the terminology/ontology itself. [Chintan Patel]
content management, interoperability, discovery, decision support [Kathy Lesh]
Standards Development communitiesMajor investments are made without considering the ontological implications. I feel we need to be more aware of these mistakes and make sure we can bring some of the knowledge to the groups. [Duane Nickull]
In an ever more automated world, ontologies represent an advance in the efforts in automation. The IT standards community is attempting to reach consensus on how to do this for many aspects of business processing. The consensus agreements, the standards, help new developers understand accepted practice, speeding implementations and interoperability.
In particular, ontologies will enhance the ability for users to find relevant data, compare data across different sources, and make conclusions based on the data at hand. There are many new kinds of applications possible, and we've only begun to scratch the surface. [Dan Gillman]
OWL Provides an active classification system for XML artifacts [carl mattocks]
Increasingly Important. I have developed a unified RDF Schema, OWL-DL representation as well as an XML Schema for the Revised Primary Base Specification of the Human Markup Language. This was intentionally, aligned with and in part, derived from the International Council of Museum Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM).
I am attempting to do the same with the Emergency Management TC's Emergency Data Exchange Language Reference Information Model (EDXL-RIM) which is in the planning stages now-03-27-07 [Rex Brooks]
A systematic way of looking inside databases established or maintained by others. Instructions for looking. [Deborah MacPherson]
Integration, Sharing, Exchange, and Hand-over of Plant Lifecycle Information [Hans Teijgeler]
Structural and operational. [Leyla Beyaz]
Ontology helps to express the domain knowledge more conveniently. This ontology is further used to classify and index the thought content of digital documents in digital libraries [Nabonita Guha]
formalizing the terms and structure of the names and definitions for business objects. [Tim McGrath]
Value of ontology is:
1. Capability to deal with problems of sense-making, collaboration, interoperability, scale, complexity, security, personalization, change & versioning, performance, and cost of net-centric solutions.
2. New modes of user experience that are ubiquitous, intelligent, adaptive, anticipatory, and context-aware as boundaries between cyber and real worlds converge and interpenetrate.
3. New categories of adaptive, autonomic, and autonomous systems that know, learn, and reason as people do. [Mills Davis]
unifier of disciplines and data collections [Jacob Teller]
Ease of use when looking for information/knowledge re a complex discipline/field (think of how much easier it is to get info from Medstory than it is from Google, on a complex medical question.....) [Marcelo Hoffmann]
Data interoperability: The representation of biological knowledge in databases is a necessity for modern biomedical research. Historically, there has been very little collaboration or coordination between different database providers. Although many grandiose schemes for the "integration" of biological data-bases have been proposed over the years, none have been practical to the point of implementation. Yet the need for integration remains, as many biologists, both those at the bench and those who analyze data computationally, wish to integrate data from a diversity of sources. The Gene Ontology Consortium (GOC) began, some several years ago, to develop a resource that could be used by both the model organism databases (e.g. FlyBase, WormBase, Mouse Genome Database, The Arabidopsis Information Resource) and the large "horizontal" databases (e.g. Uni-Prot, GeneDB, TIGR Gene Index) as a standard for the annotation of gene products. Out of this experience aros e the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry collaboration whose goal is to produce well-structured vocabularies for shared use across different biological and medical domains. Those involved agree in advance to the adoption of a growing set of principles specifying best practices in ontology development. These principles are designed to foster interoperability to ensure a gradual improvement of quality and formal rigor in ontologies, in ways designed to meet the increasing needs of data and information integration in the biomedical domain. [Suzanna Lewis]
Intelligence fusion [Ted Goranson]
model data and allow better data sharing on web [AJ Chen]
Promise of the significant reduction in ambiguity and risk ignorance. [Bob Smith, Ph.D.]

Ontology Issues

CommunityAnswer
Formal ontology communitiesMostly educational, since this is a new paradigm not many yet understand well. [Leo Obrst]
An understanding of how ontology adds value. [Matthew West]
demonstrate utility in a significant application [Patrick Cassidy]
development of practical ontologies [Alan H. Bond]
Accommodating a representation of meaning for synthetic environment systems that are representing the same real-world referent, but from a different perspective or perhaps a different focus. [Charles Turnitsa]
lack of rigorous ontologies for various domains intractability of reasoning [Michael Gruninger]
Semantic Web communities(1) explaining ontology, (2) de-mystifying ontology, (3) illustrating/demonstrating value to users/stakeholders (4) and, consequently securing funding - especially for R&D [Doug Holmes]
So many, maybe I should write an essay. I think the issue at stake at the moment is to make the case for ontology discussions not to be left solely in the logic of the mathematicians. Lots if issues at organizational level: make people understand the importance of semantic structures, and the important of using consistency when designing systems. etc [Paola Di Maio]
http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it/21abreast.htm [Leonid Ototsky]
Linguistic communitiesOntological KM [Jorge Enrique Saby Beltran]
Topic Map communityExpert opinions vary. That is an issue. It is often said that there is no single "upper ontology" that can satisfy all communities of practice. Indeed, we sought to craft one at VerticalNet (a prior employer), but, we were dealing not with "all" communities of practice, but a select few communities. With constraints, an upper ontology can be successful. But notice this fact: the upper ontology and the community ontologies were to be crafted by the same group of experts. That is not an open system. It is closed and will be as complete, as accurate, and as correct as that community is capable of making it so. In the larger universe of discourse, expert opinions can be problematic, particularly where experts disagree. I don't have a particular community in mind. My opinions speak to the needs of all possible communities. Where one is thinking in terms of some specific community, my thoughts may not be of value. [Jack Park]
Web 2.0 communitiesproving the business case finding people who have the skills & inclination getting different work groups to co-operate [Karen Loasby]
people don't understand the value of governance of terms - nor the value of having hierarchical relationships - as they see ontologies only as facilitating browsing of documents [lisa dawn colvin]
I guess the big issue is that I don't understand any of what follows in this survey, and I'm a reasonably well-informed and technically adept information architect. So there are two issues: 1) communicating clearly, and 2) explaining the value of ontologies in a way that isn't baffling. [Gene Smith]
- Many people are happy with low-level APIs and data schemas, or ad hoc conventions. There is little motivation to participate in the creation of a community standard unless it is tied to real products or services.
- People in the Web 2.0 community do not see the value of "extra" precision or clarity that comes from specification of an ontology. They are satisfied with noisy data that is derived from raw text, unrestricted tags, or other bottom up data sources. [Tom Gruber]
interoperability and clear identification of the objects being pointed to with terms [Thomas Vander Wal]
Thesauri communityWe're still sorting out the simple taxonomy foundation. We're not yet ready to do the mappings between facets using ontologies. However, we could be using ontologies for modeling business rules today. A lack of knowledge and expertise prevents this. Also, I think a lack of tools (or awareness of those tools) with the needed reasoning capabilities prevents this work. [Paul King]
Taxonomy communitiesLack of a common understanding of what is meant by ontologies - different perspectives, different applications. A framework into which most practices could plug, and a set of more/less rigorous rules for ontological business processes would be a big advance. [Denise Bedford]
Applications Development, Software Engineering and Information Model communitiesAppreciating the new way of working. [Chris Partridge]
De-mystifying it. The ontology community needs to "come down to earth" and acknowledge that ontologies are basically schema+data that is organized in such a way as to facilitate AI goals. [William Burkett]
Methods for industrializing the development in a virtual organization. [Sean Barker]
Language. The communities you describe have completely different ways of looking at the world. We need to figure out how to bring all this together. [David Hay]
The hardest balance is that between language expressivity and computational requirements [Francis mccabe]
Since the Mark 3 platform is not in beta and people cannot use it to test our assertions, there is no reason for them to stop using currently available ontology software. [Dennis L. Thomas]
System Architecture communitiesDefining the level to which it is operational, i.e. whether it embraces the rest or if it is embraced by it. Ontology is only one specific point of view. Degree of Agreement evolves over time. [Michel Biezunski]
Biomedical communities1. Very large number of formats 2. Lack of ontological engineers 3. Tool incompatibilities [Ken Baclawski]
- disconnect between ontology artifacts / approaches and practical problems - lack of distinction between various things called ontologies [Olivier Bodenreider]
No specific issue.
Medical informatics folks have embraced the notion of formal terminologies and ontologies. However, the adoption of OWL has been slow, which I believe would be highly beneficial. [Chintan Patel]
convincing the masses of the value of ontologies, proving ROI, educating that ontology is not equal to data model [Kathy Lesh]
Standards Development communitiesUnderstanding the fact we all view things differently. [Duane Nickull]
For standards developers, the biggest issue is to keep up with all the hype. There is a lot being said about ontologies in papers and books. Finding common ground and making sure the footing is solid, i.e., making sure some technology really proves itself in the market place or in implementations, are precursors to building widely accepted standards. [Dan Gillman]
Education - fellow practitioners want to understand how it relates to their work on system architecture / business framework that includes internet enabled services [carl mattocks]
Several specification in the EDXL family of specifications have been completed in singular approach, i.e. each was done separately, even though they relate to and have mutual dependencies. These include the EDXL Distribution Element which is a standard for the routing/handling of Emergency messages. EDXL Resource Messaging specifies the kinds and composition of messages pertaining to resources requested, provided and used in emergency incidents. EDXL Hospital AVailability Exchange provides a specification for a standard status report of hospital supplies, facilities and the availability of its resources and assets in any situation, but especially in emergency incidents.
There are common methods, elements and components in these specifications and we need a standard that specifies these at a sufficiently abstract level to be used to unify existing and the construct pre-unified additional specifications in the EDXL family. [Rex Brooks]
Unfamiliarity with the terminology and what exists versus what we wish for. Lack of uniform locations of subject matter. Lack of assembly process to overlay and compare large quantities of nearly similar structured specifications from project to project [Deborah MacPherson]
Hiding the complexities for the "normal" engineer [Hans Teijgeler]
Limited awareness. No appetite. Not a Focus Area. Avoidance behaviors. Resistance to disruption of the status quo. [Leyla Beyaz]
The ontology is still to represent the data models which classification community is using since years [Nabonita Guha]
Following is a slightly edited note that I sent to some colleagues, and it includes some discussions about issues that I believe are very important. I hope that it may answer some of the questions, but not in exactly the same categories as the questionnaire. And by the way, the central language in the diagram is Common Logic, but we are actually implementing the IKL extensions to CL, since we require the metalanguage capability of IKL. --John Sowa via e-mail / 28 Mar 2007 13:52:56 -0500 (EST) [John Sowa]
simple and directly applicable methods and techniques for achieving consistent solutions. [Tim McGrath]
Semantic interoperability and the associated competing 'conceptualizations' of what the term 'ontology' refers to [Matthew K. Hettinger]
Ontology for Dummies." We are working with individuals, organizations and communities of interest. Within these groups there is plenty of expertise and experience expressing thoughts, meanings and values in language of one form or another (written, formal, visual, gestural, etc.) We need semantic user interface(s) that empower groups with diverse skills to easily collaborate (exploiting the knowledge representation they already know how to do...e.g. write, model, design, program, etc.) to create, manage, share knowledge, and put it to work. [Mills Davis]
unification of data, understanding of perspectives, transformation/exploitation of merged data [Jacob Teller]
Difficulty of converting old info/knowledge into "ontologically organized" context [Marcelo Hoffmann]
1. The annotation bottleneck 2. Sustained maintenance of the requisite ontologies 3. Communications with the other communities listed above [Suzanna Lewis]
In my case, it is simply lack of time. The state of the art is not sufficient for our deep needs, but IKRIS/PSL solves a good bit and we don't have that yet because of the mechanics of collaboration. [Ted Goranson]
no truly reusable ontology [AJ Chen]
Bridging the gap between stressed and busy mainstream business/government people working with concrete "problems" and academic theory builders / Standards developers with abstract "solutions". [Bob Smith, Ph.D.]

Ontology Problems

CommunityAnswer
Formal ontology communitiesEmbedding under foundational ontologies and mappings among ontologies. [Leo Obrst]
Ignorance and confusion of basic things like class-instance, subtype-supertype, whole-part. It is distressing how few people can reliably distinguish between these in the wider world that we need to convince and interact with. [Matthew West]
developing consensus on a common foundation ontology [Patrick Cassidy]
lack of usable ontological language lack of extensive ontological practice to drive research into
ontological languages [Alan H. Bond]
quantifying the meaning of terms, in order to identify and evaluate synonyms and homonyms between systems [Charles Turnitsa]
how to combine ontologies how to create useable extracts from ontologies [Barry Smith]
development of new ontologies verification and validation of existing ontologies [Michael Gruninger]
Semantic Web communities(1) Describing the value of potential application(s) of ontology (2) Convincing potential customers/developers that it is practical to apply related technology (3) Helping developers/engineers to begin to use related technology (4) helping interested developers to create "good"and practical basic/primitive/initial ontologies (5) Illustrating practical, working system [Doug Holmes]
Specifically, help is needed in helping conceptual framework development, and to support implementation and adoption [Paola Di Maio]
http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it/21abreast.htm [Leonid Ototsky]
Linguistic communitiesDissing Ontological [Jorge Enrique Saby Beltran]
Topic Map communityExpert opinions, world views vary. Specifically, those views and opinions carry with them truth values that may vary among sources. The problem is this: all opinions and views should be shared and made available, without prior bias of any kind. That problem exists in world matters, not necessarily in individual closed communities. [Jack Park]
Web 2.0 communitiesproving the business case for standards so we can stop projects reinventing the wheel [Karen Loasby]
often ontology is compared alongside folksonomy as an equivalent concept. [lisa dawn colvin]
See above. [Gene Smith]
- Delivering tools or services that provide significant value and justify the agreement to an ontology. Ontologies are not viewed as valuable on their own.
- Need a process to produce common ontologies and encourage reuse of existing ontologies, instead of many parties rolling their own.
- Need an open, well-maintained clearinghouse for ontologies and related products and services that are enabled by them. [Tom Gruber]
Missing predicate in tagging solutions is quite problematic [Thomas Vander Wal]
Thesauri communityHow to model business rules. [Paul King]
Taxonomy communitiesI think the first step we need to take is to reach agreement on basic underlying components of ontologies, and the basic data structures for those components. [Denise Bedford]
Applications Development, Software Engineering and Information Model communitiesOther than the social problems that the ontology community has connecting with other data-centric communities, there are no technical problems. [William Burkett]
No - we have current working solutions [Sean Barker]
Not beyond the basic one of getting people in an organization to speak the same language. [David Hay]
negation, scoping [Francis mccabe]
No [Dennis L. Thomas]
System Architecture communitiesTry to elucidate the divergence between the meaning of "ontology" in the philosophical sense ("the science of being") which conveys the notion of absolute and the computer-science sense ('an exhaustive conceptual schema') which tends to impose the misleading view that there is no other way to conceptualize. An ontology should be seen as a particular world view. [Michel Biezunski]
Biomedical communitiesRepresenting uncertain facts [Ken Baclawski]
- completeness - consistency - interoperability / integration - lack of an identifying scheme for biomedical entities [Olivier Bodenreider]
I think getting of rid the 'logic community' around the OWL-standards, who are incessantly trying to add new *un-needed* features, would really help in improving the acceptance in my community. [Chintan Patel]
educating that ontology is not equal to data model, proving ROI [Kathy Lesh]
Standards Development communitiesreconciliation of several ontological concepts. [Duane Nickull]
Gruber's generally accepted definition of ontology suffers because the term "specification" is already defined in the ISO standards community, and it almost certainly doesn't mean the same thing. At the core is what ontologies are really about, and it seems to some of us that an essential characteristic is the existence of a well-defined computational model (inference or reasoning capability?). For IT standards, this is where the focus for an agreeable definition should be. [Dan Gillman]
Problem is one of too many choices. Beginners have to choose between various standards e.g flavors of WC3 OWL, SKOS, ISO Common Logic, OMG Ontology Models [carl mattocks]
Crisp definitions and context-bound definitions need to be developed that are all aligned and which belong to an upper or to several upper ontologies in a way that is consistent.
More importantly is the eventual reduction of reliance on unstructured data, i.e. free text, which practitioners are quite attached to from lifetime's of experience in previous, mostly ad hoc communities. [Rex Brooks]
Lack of uniform locations of subject matter. Lack of assembly process to systematically break information down to a correct solid foundation, then rebuild from the ground up. Lack of a way to overlay and compare large quantities of nearly similar structured specifications from project to project [Deborah MacPherson]
1)Mapping between ISO 15926 and RDF/OWL The "OWLites" are not interested in what we do, and hence not eager to help (there are good exceptions)
2)What we practice is not taught on universities [Hans Teijgeler]
Nope. [Leyla Beyaz]
In faceted classification community some basic (generic) facets are already in use which is applied to all domains. These basic facet is used to represent the basic structure of the thought content of documents. Now, how shall we represent this basic facets in ontology, so that the ontology should be useful and interoperable across domains. [Nabonita Guha]
creating simple yet unambiguous definitions for business objects. [Tim McGrath]
see above [Matthew K. Hettinger]
no [Jacob Teller]
Complexity, cost, [Marcelo Hoffmann]
good practice for creating reusable ontologies [AJ Chen]
Recognition of the economic and social benefits of increased interoperability in organizations and associations involved with large systems, especially international infrastructure (Educational networks, GIG, public health-pandemic flu situational awareness, energy-water-food systems, and the congressional staff members in the US's ability to reason more effectively about difficult to quantify issues (Which are more expressible with semantic technologies than in heated political debate). [Bob Smith, Ph.D.]

Corresponding Solutions

CommunityAnswer
Formal ontology communitiesEmbedding under existing upper/foundational ontologies such as DOLCE, SUMO, Upper Cyc, BFO, etc. Use of theory based mapping technology such as Information Flow Framework, category theory, and formal concept analysis. [Leo Obrst]
How and where does ontology make a difference? I think we aim to high at very big problems like capturing common sense. I think that maybe we should be looking at some specific small problems where there is a "bad" solution that following some ontological intervention is reengineered into a demonstrably "better" solution, and the ontological analysis can be pointed at as the reason for the improvement. [Matthew West]
money [Patrick Cassidy]
use of logic programming instead of ad hoc languages more practice and less theory [Alan H. Bond]
currently researching and evaluating an approach relying on primitives of meaning in order to address the problem of specific representation and quantification of meaning [Charles Turnitsa]
more coordination among existing research groups [Michael Gruninger]
Semantic Web communities(1) Use Cases / Examples of potential application(s) of ontology (2) Simplified Development Environment(s) for early adapters (3) Something like Design Patterns for developers (4) A "critical mass" of practical, working systems [Doug Holmes]
not any single one, but working on methodology [Paola Di Maio]
http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it/21abreast.htm [Leonid Ototsky]
Linguistic communitiesOntological KM and education [Jorge Enrique Saby Beltran]
Topic Map communityArchitectures that map opinions and expertise together appear to be an appropriate solution/technology. The key point here is that said architectures perform the mapping without bias, in a loss-free way. This implies that disparate world views need to be brought together. Recall my earlier statement that this might not apply in closed communities where appeal to some specific brand of expertise is bought and paid for. But, in the larger picture of social sensemaking in world-class problems, I think that the present U.S. government's leaders are making it quite clear that there is room for dissenting opinions and world views. Those are the problems spaces/communities where I believe my suggestions apply. I have long been saying that topic maps of one sort or another offer candidate solutions to the problems I have outlined here. Even the simpler "concept maps" can make a difference, but I would argue that the higher-degree of mapping achieved when you are able to represent the associations between subjects as subjects themselves (not available in concept maps, available in conceptual graphs and in topic maps) renders the universe of discourse more capable of being dissected, discussed, and even corrected where appropriate. [Jack Park]
Web 2.0 communitiescommunity - further work on dimensions of ontologies - not only around semantic expressivity, but also in enablement of social collaboration . more use cases on where to use different levels of ontologies (semantic expressivity) [lisa dawn colvin]
Plain language. [Gene Smith]
- an open, well-maintained clearinghouse for ontologies and related products and services that are enabled by them.
- a clear binding of ontologies to these products and services so that people can find the ontology based on their functional requirements, rather than the domain of discourse.
- a social / community process that rewards building on existing ontologies. [Tom Gruber]
iTags and TagCommons [Thomas Vander Wal]
Thesauri communityNo. It's not really something I am responsible for solving, so I have not looked into it. [Paul King]
Taxonomy communitiesFirst of all, we need to be inclusive rather than exclusive. I think it would be helpful to have a working group come up with a first cut at the essential functional components of an ontology. Then individual groups or project teams (such as an extended Taxo Thesaurus project team) could take the individual components and elaborate data structures, behaviors, etc. There is a 'chicken and egg' problem involved in specifying the components and defining the functionality/business processes -- however, if we had a systematic strategy, I think we could work this out. Or, at least push it as far as it can go at this time. [Denise Bedford]
Applications Development, Software Engineering and Information Model communitiesThe "come down to earth" suggestion is the only one I have. [William Burkett]
I've been a big fan of conceptual data modeling for a long time. But that is a very specific technique that, to be successful, will require a change of attitude at the highest levels. [David Hay]
I dread to think, given the amount of ink spilled on negation over the years [Francis mccabe]
Only Knowledge Foundations' Mark 3 theory-based semantic technology. [Dennis L. Thomas]
System Architecture communitiesDecompose in a common low level representation, and recompose several views (=ontologies). This is equivalent to decompose operations in assembly language, and recompose them according to different high level languages. [Michel Biezunski]
Biomedical communitiesSee the meeting at http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OpenGroupSICoP_2006_04_27 [Ken Baclawski]
- methods / metrics for evaluating ontologies - methods for automatic acquisition of ontologies (e.g., from text corpora) - reference ontologies, upper-level ontologies [Olivier Bodenreider]
Well I think the evidence is out there. How many 'real world ontologies' actually use the core OWL-DL constructs (cardinality constraints, disjunction etc)? may be only a handful.
So why is the W3C standards committee seeing the need for adding more expressivity into already bloated OWL? [Chintan Patel]
In the healthcare community, get HITSP members to understand the difference between an ontology and a data model, that standard terminology alone will not provide interoperability. [Kathy Lesh]
Standards Development communitiesSUMO [Duane Nickull]
ODM from OMG has made an excellent start. [Dan Gillman]
If the authors of different Ontology-centric standards cannot differentiate between themselves (in simple language) then a reputable institution (NIST ?) should publish a guideline that helps potential users make an informed choice about what is appropriate for intended use [carl mattocks]
Gradually breaking down the resistance to ontologies by adding levels of semantic unification such as encouraging communities, such as counties within a state to settle on a set of terms for their emergency operations, organizational structure, etc and having them published using ISO11179 naming and design rules and the eXtended MetaData Registry format would help get this started so that any other emergency related suppliers or jurisdictions can find and use the terminologies of the local communities when emergency incidents occur. Later, we can collect these locally published lists of terms, definitions and datamodels into ontologies based on geospatial and political boundaries and provide them in a semantically structured and referenced registry or registries on the web and tie the architecture together as a working Service Oriented Architecture. [Rex Brooks]
Develop uniform locations of subject matters.
Share properties and data descriptions based on their number, or address in mutual locations.
Use more visual languages and symbols rather than terms. [Deborah MacPherson]
1)Convince Tim Berners-Lee (so far that was impossible).
2)Convince the universities (not tried seriously yet) [Hans Teijgeler]
Still under research .... [Nabonita Guha]
we seem to operate by consensus and experience. [Tim McGrath]
In my opinion, a well-known holistic solution has not been forth-coming. There are hypothesized partial solutions [Matthew K. Hettinger]
1. Semantic user experience & semantic social computing -- most researchers, ontologists and semantic web types are clueless. The Web 2.0 crowd has a clue, but lacks the right technology. Focusing here will jump-start multi-billion dollar markets.
2. Semantic processing -- Three key challenges are:
(a) reasoning more than logical truth or falsity e.g., dealing with causality, conflict, uncertainty, and diverse value systems,
(b) hi-performance (& easily programmed) semantic processing across multi-core, multi-thread, grid, mesh, and parallel environments, and
(c) semantic processing at web scale. [Mills Davis]
no [Jacob Teller]
I do not know. [Marcelo Hoffmann]
Value-Knowledge-Problem "Couplers" for local community-based discussion and arguments over quality of life variables. For example, Jon Bosak has evolved a governance and research initiative called the Tompkins County Project that is, essentially, the mother of all contingency scenarios. This works at the City and County level. Another approach to improved local community consensus is a Simulation Modeling project similar to the national health care debate funded by the Markle Foundation a decade ago for policy impact analysis. [Bob Smith, Ph.D.]