Mike Bennett wrote:
> There is an exact parallel of this process that has been going on with
> XML standards over the last 8 - 10 years. There are some interesting
> lessons, and I think a lot of the players will probably involve
> themselves in the semantics effort once it gains some traction as a tool
> for development and integration at those firms that saw the value in the
> XML standardisation efforts. Indeed many firms have invested time and
> resources into helping development of XML standards on the false
> assumption that this would help them deal with matters of common
> meanings within their firms.
>
> There have also been turf wars of course. In the financial sector we had
> a plethora of new and proposed standards for XML, though none made as
> much headway as the non-XML FIX standard (which has XML as a bolt-on).
> Meanwhile each standard wanted to try to take on as much of the target
> subject area as it could, while at the same time people were constantly
> saying "we must not reinvent the wheel" and signing MoUs with other
> standards groups.
>
> If the financial industry is anything to go by, you would see one or two
> industry associations sponsoring standards, and an industry
> infrastructure player (SWIFT) involving itself closely in the emergence
> of open standards because they had relied heavily on their own
> (ISO-mandated) standard for years and could not afford to lose market
> dominance. As lean years follow plentiful years, different people scale
> back or put more effort in, and the major players (e.g. the major market
> data vendors for market data language) would put in effort proportional
> to how successful the standard was likely to be. If the standard was
> unlikely to be a success, it was no threat to them.
>
> A lot of potential users of the standards were afraid that it was all
> some big incomprehensible "alphabet soup" whereas in fact most of the
> standards did not overlap. However none of them had a good
> technology-neutral requirements structure or model of business
> semantics, so the lack of overlap was only visible to those of us who
> knew what were the intended semantics and business usage of each and
> every standard. Typically the sponsors of each standard would regard
> their own world as the whole world, and were weak on explicitly
> specifying context. This can also be a weakness in ontology development
> in the absence of rules about how to specify meaningful context.
>
> The main place where there becomes a problem about who is "the" standard
> is not in these small, silo-specific standards but in the standards
> bodies that they eventually try to register their material with. There
> are essentially two competing standards bodies globally: the
> International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the United Nations. So in
> financial services most of the different XML standards either have been
> or will be incorporated into the various standards that are set for the
> financial industry (ISO TC68). I understand from looking at efforts in
> other industries that much the same happens across the board.
>
> Meanwhile the UN has the UN/CEFACT set of standards for electronic
> trade, which is pretty comprehensive and far reaching. Parts of
> UN/CEFACT are now also registered as ISO standards (e.g. ISO 11179 which
> has been mentioned here), and parts of the electronic business ebXML
> standard form parts of the UN/CEFACT family as well as being ISO
> standards in their own right. So eventually the two bodies do indeed
> come together. You also have various alliances being struck with more
> development-oriented standards, such as the recent MoU between FIX and
> the OMG.
>
> So this is the sort of process that will happen, and it seems to go
> pretty well. There is lots of good will and good intention. There are
> egos that want to run the world but they are not always good at getting
> people to work for them for free so they don't get as far as they would
> like. There are people who think their world is the whole world or who
> have a limited grasp of the wider context - or who baulk at the very use
> of words like context or meaning as being too airy and philosophical for
> them. There are people who think their industry group's content is so
> well known and self-explanatory as to do away with any need to formally
> document it. However, among all these human failings, pragmatism does
> tend to win the day.
>
> Meanwhile it should be noted that ISO has a very good process for taking
> an existing stable standard from one country or organisation, and
> anointing it as an international standard. What it does not have,
> however, is any good business process for developing anything itself.
> Much of the recent ISO standardisation effort in the financial industry
> has gone badly within ISO because the system of setting up committees
> and working groups does not enforce the basics of good development
> practice, such as requirements statements, quality assurance and change
> management. So some very complex technical artefacts have been designed
> and built (e.g. the ISO 19312 Financial Instruments Business Information
> Model, now incoroprated into ISO 20022) without the most rudimentary
> application of good pratice for development of technical artefacts (what
> process there has been, was hidden within SWIFT).
>
> It is largely as a recognition of these failures that the EDM Council
> has sponsored the Semantics Repository that I have been working on. I
> worked closely with some of the same players in trying to complete an
> XML-based standard for market data (MDDL), and it is now clear that what
> the participants really wanted was not some XML messaging standard but
> standardisation of actual business meaning. This is because what the
> industry saw value in was increased ability to interoperate across the
> business supply chain. So in a sense XML was mis-sold: the techies said
> it was self-documenting and could define things in natural language
> (without the need to write anything down outside the schema), while the
> non techies assumed that words were as good as meanings. The example
> someone gave here of the word Bond is a good refutation of that. So is
> almost every term when you look at it (e.g. what does "price" mean?)
>
> So the real challenge in the years ahead, I think, will be to ensure
> that those who are competent to do so, develop ontologies, while those
> that are competent to anoint something as a standard do that and that
> alone. I do think that the ontology standards need to go beyond "this is
> a Thing" and implement some common sense rules for how context and other
> aids to semantics can be made to work. Otherwise will just have a repeat
> of the XML phase, using RDF and OWL.
>
> If this is managed right, and with engagement from the different
> business communities of practice, we should be able to end up with
> ontologies that are mature enough, complete enough and widely adopted
> enough to then be registered with the relevant committee within ISO as
> possible standards. It will then be the business stakeholders (via their
> representatives on ISO and on national standards committees) who will
> move these forward within the well-established ISO adoption process.
>
> Mike
>
> Ron Wheeler wrote:
>
I agree with this view.
My only concern is that I am not sure if application developers will be
able to a) wait for standards bodies to settle on winners or b) find the
appropriate standards body for each ontology required. (01)
Ron (02)
>
>> Matthew West wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> Dear Ron,
>>>
>>> Just one point.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> I just want to have a ghost of a chance of being able build up a
>>>> compatible set of ontologies (basic science, units of measure, physics,
>>>> chemistry, process equipment, instrumentation, health and safety,
>>>> regulatory, etc.) from many sources. I want to use them without having
>>>> to rename everything.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> [MW] What I am hoping for, is that for these basic things, the people
>>> responsible for their definition (the authoritative source) will provide
>>> suitable URIs. So for example, that the International Committee for Weights
>>> and Measures (Comité international des poids et measures) will provide the
>>> ones for units of measure. I think that an authoritative source can be
>>> identified for most of the things you mention above. The problem I see is in
>>> persuading them to rise to the challenge of providing the web identities and
>>> definitions. Perhaps we could help?
>>>
>>> What I fear is that everyone will define their own identities and
>>> definitions for e.g. units of measure.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> I am a little less concerned about this since I think that the
>> marketplace will chose the "best" ontologies rather naturally.
>> Forums like this will have a great role to play in the process of
>> natural selection.
>>
>> Ontologies that include or are dedicated to units of measure will
>> support existing standards and will gradually coalesce to a common base
>> that application designers will find most useful and most easily
>> integrated with other ontologies. Probably there will be informal
>> agreements to build compatible sets that can make up a seemless
>> application ontology(such as Apache Software Foundation's work on the
>> Java stack ).
>> It will be a PITA in the first few years to guess who the ultimate
>> winners are but that is just part of the whole technology selection
>> process that we have to do today when starting a project.
>> I can not just pick the Apache stack since I want a more established
>> database system. I expect to face the same challenges in selecting a set
>> of foundation ontologies.
>>
>> The usefulness to others of any ontology that I develop will depend on
>> the choice that I made for a "units of measure" ontology.
>> People who really like my ontology but hate my choice for "unit of
>> measure" may redo my ontology with a better foundation set and release
>> that to the marketplace so that I may have to revisit my own choices
>> later. That is the price you pay for getting it wrong.
>>
>> The marketplace may be cruel but it does eventually pick a set of winners.
>> Big players such as IBM, US government, DOD and Microsoft have the power
>> to distort the process but that is just a fact of life.
>>
>> It will be interesting to see what the major Indian and Chinese players
>> will come up with as ontologies.
>>
>> Ron
>>
>>
>>
>>> Regards
>>>
>>> Matthew West
>>> http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>
>
> (03)
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