Patrick Cassidy wrote:
> John,
> Concerning your point:
>
>> The best designs are developed by small groups. After they have
>> proved their value on at least one important application, a committee
>> can evaluate them, note missing or inadequate features, and polish up
>> the details.
>>
>>
> This may well be true of foundation ontologies, though a foundation
> ontology is different enough from other artifacts to give one doubts about
> any analogies. Even if it is true, it is not inconsistent with development
> by a large group (50-100 participants), since each part of the ontology
> beyond the top level or two is likely to be the focus of a small subgroup,
> and the group as a whole would serve the function of the "committee" to be
> sure that the work of the subgroups integrates with everything else and can
> handle the applications of interest to the whole group.
>
>
I can see how this group would collapse into jurisdictional disputes.
Who gets to define the medical ontology - drug companies, medical
equipment companies, HMOs, hospitals, WHO, etc.?
Software engineering belongs to who?
What about process control - Equipment suppliers, system integrators,
engineers?
Transportation - carriers, travel agents, shipping companies, governments?
Homeland Security - can you imagine the FBI adopting an ontology set up
by Scotland Yard or the KGB or the Chinese Army let alone the CIA or
Pentagon? If the FBI went along what would be the resistance from state
and municipal police? (01)
How is the funding to be divided up? So much per term and relationship
defined? (02)
What about the funding agencies/companies - do they get a final say?
What if the ontology does not meet their needs, will they continue to
fund it once they realize that their needs are not being met? (03)
What are the language(computer and human) choices for expressing ontologies?
Who is responsible for translation between computer languages and
between national languages? (04)
My ontology for process control or homeland security could (and should)
be very different from someone else's since we will view objects and
relationships differently and will need different results. (05)
I think that ontologies will be developed as small packages and
application designers will have pick the namespaces that they require
for their needs. (06)
Sometimes this will result in new merged ontologies being published.
Some ontologies will be abandoned as better ones appear. (07)
The focus should be on identifying ontologies as they emerge, commenting
on them and providing peer review to improve quality.
The development of tools to support this process and the use of the
ontologies as they arise is a much better place for funding to be focused. (08)
Ron (09)
> Pat
>
> Patrick Cassidy
> MICRA, Inc.
> 908-561-3416
> cell: 908-565-4053
> cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
>> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
>> Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 2:20 AM
>> To: [ontolog-forum]
>> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Semantic Web shortcomings [was Re: ANN:
>> GoodRelations - The Web Ontology for E-Commerce]
>>
>> Ron,
>>
>> Just a comment about standards:
>>
>> > My understanding is that most of the "best" standards have come
>> > about through a consensus between the major commercial players
>> > with the active (frequently funded) participation of the academic
>> > community.
>>
>> The important caveat is that committees are terrible at design,
>> but they're very good at evaluation. There are many proverbs and
>> anecdotes about that point:
>>
>> - Too many cooks spoil the broth.
>>
>> - A camel is a horse designed by committee. (This is a slur on
>> camels, which are very well designed for their environment.)
>>
>> - Fred Brooks' _Mythical Man Month_, in which he observes that
>> OS/360 would have been far better designed by a group of
>> about a dozen designers instead of 150.
>>
>> The best designs are developed by small groups. After they have
>> proved their value on at least one important application, a committee
>> can evaluate them, note missing or inadequate features, and polish up
>> the details.
>>
>> A prime example is FORTRAN, which was designed by a group of
>> "academics"
>> who happened to be employed by IBM (at a time when IBM had a sufficient
>> monopoly to throw money at researchers who weren't making a measurable
>> contribution to the bottom line).
>>
>> There were a few programming languages implemented before FORTRAN,
>> but they were all very inefficient (at a time when computers were
>> a few thousand times slower than today's cell phones). The FORTRAN
>> group (of about half a dozen people led by John Backus) set out to
>> design a language and compiler that would produce code that was close
>> to the efficiency of code produced by a decent assembly-language
>> programmer. And they succeeded.
>>
>> After a couple of iterations by IBM, FORTRAN IV became a very good,
>> very usable, and very efficient language for numeric computation.
>> The ANSI and later ISO standards bodies took over. Over fifty years
>> later, they are still producing new revisions that preserve much
>> of the original core language. Today, FORTRAN is still the most
>> efficient and most widely used language for high-speed numeric
>> computation.
>>
>> For some related thoughts, see the "Law of Standards," which I
>> formulated in 1991:
>>
>> http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/standard.htm
>>
>> And by the way, the original WWW was designed by a small group,
>> but the Semantic Web was designed by a very large committee.
>>
>> John Sowa
>>
>>
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