Dear Colleagues, (01)
I was unfortunately not able to attend this talk, but Peter asked
me to comment on it. So here goes. (02)
The talk essentially proposes Federating ontologies (rather than
integrating or merging them) and using Topic Maps for the purpose. (03)
Federation is nothing new, and you don't need Topic Maps to do it
(though it is one way). Federation basically says that you can map
(interface) different ontologies instead of merge/integrate them. (04)
This is of course true. There are however disadvantages, in that
you have to "hop over" into another ontology to do the things it
does, so you can find yourself having to understand multiple
ontologies, rather than just your favourite one. The overall
capabilities are also more limited, since not everything is visible
everywhere. (05)
History shows that we integrate as much as we can, and then
interface between the bits we can't (don't have time) to integrate.
It is the old islands of automation story, with interfaces between
the islands where you continuously try to make the islands bigger.
Federation tries to make this a virtue. I was always
expecting that we would federate the main ontologies, but with
some integration/cross over as well. (06)
If you want a different view on this, I could give a talk on
ISO 18876 - integration of industrial data for exchange access
and sharing (IIDEAS). This provides an architectural framework
for integrating/federating and what it involves. (07)
I don't follow the worked example they have from the slides, but
it looks a little simplistic to me. Also, to form aribtrary mappings
my experience is you need FOL, and Topic Maps falls short of this,
so I would expect some limitations to what could be mapped. (08)
Regards (09)
Matthew West
Reference Data Architecture and Standards Manager
Shell International Petroleum Company Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom (010)
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Mobile: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.west@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.shell.com
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/ (011)
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