On Dec 10, 2004, at 10:13 AM, Nicolas F Rouquette wrote:
> My hunch is that the similarity between "sound" software engineering
> principles
> and "formal ontology" development is much stronger than one might
> acknowledge.
> (01)
I agree with the points that you are raising. I personally like to
think of ontologies as software components, but this view clearly is
not universal. Much of the "language wars" of the past few years
concerning the "appropriate" level of expressiveness for ontology
languages points to the tension in the community. As I mentioned in my
talk, the folks in the trenches tend to be reaching for impoverished
knowledge representation systems that meet their immediate needs (e.g.,
DAG-Edit) whereas there are folks from the logic community who would
like to promote undecidable representations in the name of maximum
expressiveness. I've heard certain logicians claim that the complexity
of the representation system doesn't matter, since ontologies are meant
for computers, not people. (02)
But just as software engineers do not choose to program Turing
machines, ontology builders are seeking representation systems and
tools that have maximum cognitive tractability for them. That's why
DAG-Edit has become so popular among biologists, even though the
resulting ontologies are rather crippled. (03)
The Apelon tool that NCI currently uses for ontology development does
not enforce scoping or conventions of software-engineering of
object-oriented systems. But I agree strongly for the need for that
kind of development support, and we increasingly are building those
kinds of capabilities into our Protege and PROMPT systems. (04)
Although the OMG crowd does not use the "O" word, I think that as their
model-driven architecture approach gathers strength, and as people
realize that are reasons for modeling application areas beyond the
restrictions of UML, we will see even greater overlap between
traditional software-engineering and the development of ontologies as
our community thinks of them. (05)
Thanks again for asking me to talk on Thursday,
Mark (06)
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