Hi Mills, (01)
When I say user, I include machine agents, which can't yet do "deep
linguistics" (neither apparently can some people, vis the common
sorts of errors we see in the health care system). I'm not a heavy
user of the UMLS, so I will need to leave it to someone else to
comment authoritatively, but my impression is that it's design it not
aimed in the same space that ontology development is - that it
provides useful, for some applications, mappings between terms, but
that those mappings are often not as precise as equivalence, nor are
the terms decomposed into logical definitions in a way that lets one
do automated reasoning of the sort one might like to do in planning,
diagnosis, or research biology. (02)
Regards,
Alan (03)
On Mar 4, 2008, at 9:58 AM, Mills Davis wrote: (04)
> Alan,
>
> No need to take cover, but I don't understand why you say that a user
> would need to know all "equivalent ways of saying the same thing".
> That's what deep linguistics are for. For example, a system like UMLS
> allows users to query about, say, Addisons Disease in English,
> French, or German, and return all relevant responses. Also, the
> megathesaurus tracks the evolution of the meaning of certain concepts
> through time.
>
> Mills
>
> On Mar 4, 2008, at 9:10 AM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>
>> As used in the OBO Foundry, orthogonality is better first understood
>> on a term by term basis. Adding a term that is trivially redundant
>> with another one, by denoting the same thing, is the first thing to
>> avoid. Less trivially, if there is a way to logically define the new
>> terms in terms of existing ones, then not doing so leads to a
>> situation where two users might denote the same thing in two
>> unconnected ways: Using the new term, or using the compound of
>> existing terms. This is also to be avoided, if possible.
>>
>> The reason to avoid these situations is that one typically uses an
>> ontology to mediate queries and it is desirable to have any query
>> return all relevant answers. Having two ways to say the same thing
>> means that the user needs to know both ways to ask the question, and
>> this puts a higher burden on learning and using the ontology.
>>
>> Generalizing to orthogonality between ontologies, we'd understand two
>> ontologies as being orthogonal if no term in one is orthogonal to the
>> other ontology, in the senses above.
>>
>> -Alan
>> (preparing to take cover ;-)
>>
>> On Mar 4, 2008, at 8:42 AM, Bill Andersen wrote:
>>
>>> It's a category error to apply the notion of orthogonality to
>>> ontologies since ontologies are not vectors.
>>>
>>> More informally speaking, there may be some sort of linguistic-based
>>> heuristic notion you're after but you'd have to say what that
>>> might be
>>> and what you want to do with it.
>>>
>>> Bill Andersen
>>> Ontology Works, Inc.
>>> 3600 O'Donnell Street, Suite 600
>>> Baltimore, MD 21224
>>> +1.410.675.1204 (w)
>>> +1.410.675.1201 (f)
>>> +1.443.858.6444 (m)
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mar 4, 2008, at 5:31 AM, "Alexander Garcia Castro"
>>> <alexgarciac@xxxxxxxxx
>>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hopefully this is not so out of focus. I am looking for a
>>>> definition
>>>> for orthogonality. When are ontologies orthogonal? Any body who can
>>>> recommend me some good papers about orthogonal ontologies? Is there
>>>> a measure for orthogonality?
>>>>
>>>>
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