In Mark Musen's presentation on the ontolog forum, (01)
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2004_12_09 (02)
Mark mentioned that NCI has an elaborate change management process to deal
with the complexity of lots of changes made in a distributed fashion.
The rationale
here is understandable in terms of minimizing the negative impacts of
propagating
changes that might conflict with somebody's particular use of the ontology. (03)
Notwithstanding the proprietary factors involved in NCI's dependence on
a commercial tool,
this problem seems to beg to ask whether the NCI ontology has a way of
describing a number
of generic software notions such as: (04)
1) scope (05)
e.g., someone's limited use of a subset of the larger ontology
(akin to the concept of modularity in component-oriented software
architecture (06)
2) contract (07)
e.g., the nature of the inferences, classifications and reasoning that
someone's use of a particular scope
of the ontology either (08)
-- depends on in the sense of middle / upper ontology partial dependency
ordering (09)
(akin to the concept of required interface in component-oriented
software architecture) (010)
or (011)
-- provides to others in the sense of lower / middle partial subsumption
ordering (012)
3) extension point (013)
e.g., the classes intended for "use" via subclassing (as in
refinement-based specialization) or instantition (as in reification for
disjoint ontology development) (014)
(akin to the concept of aspect & subject oriented development) (015)
My hunch is that the similarity between "sound" software engineering
principles
and "formal ontology" development is much stronger than one might
acknowledge. (016)
Comments? Suggestions? (017)
-- Nicolas.
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