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[ontolog-forum] Next steps in using ontologies as standards

To: "'[ontolog-forum] '" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Tolk, Andreas" <atolk@xxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 12:42:19 -0500
Message-id: <4839109173C2DF4FAE02C9C3FBEE973F2803745240@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Happy New Year to everyone!
Coming from the modeling side, I may have a slightly different view on this 
discussion. For me, a model represents a viewpoint of a problem. As such, 
several models can be used to describe the some world referent (real or virtual 
worlds and systems). The models may even seem to be contradictive, but all 
viewpoints are necessary to understand and/or describe the world referent.
We are using ontologies to describe models. As such, we are interested in data, 
processes, and constraints. Ontologies are great as they allow us to 
communicate different data structures used within or using different processes 
under different constraints in a consistent and common form. While the ontology 
as such describes the viewpoint/model in a consistent and common way, we can 
now use the different ontologies describing different viewpoints on one system 
or different systems that have to be composed into a new system of systems and 
find out if we can mediate between these views. Semantic lossless mediation 
between viewpoints/models is the objective (or dream) of our work.
As such, our view on standards is more directed on the ontological means that 
are needed to capture all aspects of a viewpoint and document theses aspects in 
a machine understandable way.
We realize that models are the product of simplification and abstraction, and 
as such result in formal specifications of conceptualizations. The objective of 
a standard is NOT to make all models equal, but to enable to lossless mediation 
between complete specifications.
We build models because the world as a whole is too complicated to be 
understood. We need different models to describe the different views. We cannot 
come up with one model, as this model would either be not complete or not 
understandable ... so we cannot come up with one ontology describing one 
viewpoint as well.
Standards will help to enable the homogeneous interpretation of heterogeneous 
views to gradually improve the knowledge about the modeled part of the world.
Our goal is to use ontologies for systems engineering, starting with capturing 
requirements in form of ontological expressions that can be proven and 
resulting in machine understandable annotations for system services that can be 
used to support lossless mediation and composition for selection and 
orchestration of services in SOA or systems on SoS.
All the best
Andreas    (01)

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