Ron,
The cost is estimated as the cost to the country **as a whole**, not to
any individual group. Once again, you have missed some vital points:
(1) No one company will necessarily recover the whole cost of
development;
(2) No one company building its own foundation ontology will have a
means of communicating with other companies who haven't participated in the
project. (01)
The efficiency of communication comes from a lot of people using it.
Devising a language for yourself and sitting in a corner talking to yourself
may be amusing, but not economically beneficial. (02)
In order for a communication language to serve its purpose, it has to be
used by a lot of people, and for something as complex as a foundation
ontology, the best way to guarantee that wide usage is to have a lot of
people participate in its development. (03)
Pat (04)
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx (05)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ron Wheeler
> Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 10:40 PM
> To: [ontolog-forum]
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Semantic Web shortcomings [was Re: ANN:
> GoodRelations - The Web Ontology for E-Commerce]
>
> 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.
>
>
> Let industry groups fund the parts needed to support their domain.
> Why should taxpayers subsidize a project with such a high, short-term
> payoff.
>
> Let the 10 largest companies in any domain get together and fund it.
>
> Ron
>
>
> 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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