At 11:50 AM -0600 6/12/07, Conklin, Don wrote:
>For Kathy: please let me know when you come upon that well-designed
>probabilistic ontology, I'd really like to see it.
>
>Don Conklin
>Lockheed Martin
>Information Systems & Global Services
>7021 Harbour View Blvd, Suite 105
>Suffolk, VA 23435
>757-935-9581 Office
>757-935-9563 Fax (01)
I don't think I'm going to come upon one by serendipity any time
soon. But I'm aiming to make one happen! (02)
I (as well as many others) have been working on the necessary
foundations for a number of years, and the theory and languages are
now well enough advanced that it's possible to build bona fide
probabilistic ontologies. (The state of usability of the tools is
another matter!) My colleagues, students and I have built several
toy probabilistic ontologies. I've worked with colleagues to build
artifacts that were called "probability models" but had features that
one associates with ontologies, i.e, were built in expressive
probabilistic languages with have types and individuals, subtypes and
inheritance, attributes and relations. I wouldn't call any of these
"well-engineered probabilistic ontologies" for the reason that they
were built for clients to solve specific problems, and had to make
compromises because there were no good upper ontologies for some of
the things the system had to do, and there was no time to build them,
so hacks were devised that worked for the purpose of the specific
problem but would give a principled ontologist a queasy feeling. (03)
I expect this situation to dramatically change over the next decade.
Stay tuned! (04)
Kathy (05)
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