If an ontology will save someone or some group $100,000,000, then they
should just pay the $10,000,000 and get what they need. (01)
Let industry groups fund the parts needed to support their domain.
Why should taxpayers subsidize a project with such a high, short-term
payoff. (02)
Let the 10 largest companies in any domain get together and fund it. (03)
Ron (04)
Patrick Cassidy wrote:
> John,
> I agree with all of your comments except the last one about the number of
> primitives required to define many fields. It seems to me to be
> counterproductive to assume an answer before a proper test is performed.
> The relevant precedent of work with the Longman defining vocabulary is, I
> believe, highly suggestive of a reasonably small (<10,000) concept set that
> can specify the meaning of anything of interest, by combinations of the
> primitives. Of course the initial set will be open to supplementation; if
> the rate of supplementation is small, it will still serve the purpose of
> accurate interoperability.
> And yes, any such complex standard not only needs to be able to evolve, it
> should be designed so that it can evolve with experience. But for anything
> to evolve, it first needs to survive. That is the point of kicking off such
> a project with a large (>50) group of designer/developers, so that there
> will be a sufficient critical mass of groups with enough of a stake in the
> standard to keep it alive until it becomes so obviously useful that
> commercial vendors will start to build utilities for it and applications
> demonstrating its capabilities.
> If it does gain traction, there may well be hundreds of millions of
> dollars spent on projects that use it, but that will not be the development
> cost, which should be in the low tens of millions (with maintenance costs
> perhaps 10% of that per annum, for a while). An important point missing
> from this discussion up to now is that we are talking about development cost
> for the foundation ontology (not the applications), which very much limits
> the amount of work that needs to be done even for developing a powerful
> natural-language interface, using the associated linguistic defining
> vocabulary.
>
> 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: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 3:51 PM
>> To: [ontolog-forum]
>> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Semantic Web shortcomings [was Re: ANN:
>> GoodRelations - The Web Ontology for E-Commerce]
>>
>> Pat, Ron, and Sean,
>>
>> There are complex issues involved, and single words like 'foundation'
>> or 'framework' can't convey all of them and enable everybody to
>> interpret them in consistent ways. As we have seen from various
>> emails, there are as many different interpretations of anything as
>> there are people who post messages to this list.
>>
>> RW>> Who gets to define the medical ontology - drug companies, medical
>> >> equipment companies, HMOs, hospitals, WHO, etc.?
>>
>> PC> Any member of the project who is interested. Membership in any
>> > working group should be fully open - no one can feel 'left out'
>> > of anything.
>>
>> There is a difference between being "fully open" and letting every
>> possible proposal develop independently. There will always be
>> conflicts, and every committee needs a method for resolving them.
>> Many groups that produce standards and recommendations are open
>> in the sense that anybody can submit a proposal or comment on it.
>> But there have to be tight controls over the voting and approval
>> procedures for choosing among the various proposals.
>>
>> Furthermore, as I pointed out in previous notes, the best standards
>> usually evolve from well-designed systems that were implemented
>> by small groups. Some of those systems might be developed by a
>> commercial group (such as FORTRAN from IBM) and others might be
>> developed by several institutions with government funding (such
>> as the original ARPANET protocols, which became the basis for the
>> Internet).
>>
>> RW> You are describing an open source project where each member "who
>> > is interested" puts in his/her 2 cents and the core group decides
>> > what gets committed. This is difficult to fund with taxpayers'
>> > money since there is no one who can be held accountable and no
>> > organization who can commit to delivering a pre-defined deliverable.
>>
>> Consider the development of the original WWW. The foundation was
>> ARPANET, which went through a long development as a DoD sponsored
>> project before a movement started to open it up (with legislation
>> sponsored by Al Gore), and it became the Internet. Then a small
>> group with funding from European governments started a project to
>> facilitate communication among physics projects around the world.
>> That became the original WWW, which was text based.
>>
>> Then some people at the U. of Illinois started a small project
>> called Mosaic, which got some gov't funding, and provided an
>> interface that supported graphics. The WWW guys adopted a
>> previous ISO standard called SGML (which evolved from a 1969
>> project at IBM called GML) and they called it HTML. The Mosaic
>> guys added more features to HTML to support graphics. Later
>> they developed a commercial version called Netscape, which was
>> so popular that it established a de facto standard for HTML.
>>
>> Similar things have been happening with the Semantic Web.
>> Cyc received a great deal of funding from the gov't for their
>> language called CycL. A former associate director of Cyc,
>> named Ramanathan Guha, left Cyc and worked at a couple of
>> places, including Apple, where he proposed a much simpler
>> notation. Then Guha teamed up with Tim Bray to design a
>> version of Guha's simple notation in XML, and they called it
>> RDF. But as Bray later pointed out, the initial version of
>> RDF was badly designed, and he recommended a cleaner version:
>>
>> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/21/RDFNet
>>
>> However, too many people had vested interests in the early
>> version, and they resisted attempts to revise it.
>>
>> Note that the WWW took a long time to evolve, and the basic
>> standards that support it evolved from two totally different
>> projects in the late 1960s: ARPANET sponsored by DoD and
>> GML by a group of 3 guys at IBM. GML became SGML primarily
>> because of the persistence of the man who was the G in GML:
>> Charlie Goldfarb. The idea of hypertext was also proposed
>> in the 1960s by Ted Nelson, and versions of it were implemented
>> by various groups, including Apple.
>>
>> But the WWW was not developed by IBM or Apple or DoD, and the
>> people who had the original ideas, Nelson and Goldfarb, were not
>> involved. Instead, it was done by a tiny group in Switzerland
>> at a physics lab called CERN. The group that contributed as much
>> or more to the "look and feel" of what most people call the WWW
>> were the Mosaic group in Illinois and their commercial version
>> called Netscape, which eventually lost out to a another browser,
>> also based on Mosaic, but which had a bigger monopoly behind it.
>>
>> SB> can you coherently claim that everything can be described in
>> > a few thousand fundamental concepts, since what distinguishes
>> > them is a language game?
>>
>> I would say that the necessary number of defining concepts is either
>> 0 or infinity. If you choose 0, all concepts (or predicates) are
>> defined implicitly by axioms. If you choose explicit definitions,
>> then any positive integer is an inadequate approximation to infinity.
>>
>> John Sowa
>>
>>
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