That is how I have been thinking about this. I think any talk of
creating a global ontology of everything is essentially redundant
because of the different content-related standards that already exist in
different industries can be reflected in ontologies, then there is
plenty of uncontroversial material to be going on with. (01)
By this I mean not so much the standards with which technology is
developed (like SQL, XML, UML, HTML and so on), but the ways in which
most industries by now have tried to standardise terms for electronic
interchange of data - initially in various EDI formats and more recently
in XML. There are standards in insurance, finance, accounts reporting,
international trade as well as smaller ones for things like paper. Most
of these are in XML, most of them have been developed with varying
degrees of successful independent modeling of the required semantics
(e,.g. ACORD has this, FpML does not). All of these XML based standards
would benefit from the creation, by their own bodies, of a usable
ontology defining the business terms and definitions that currently
reside in the heads of the XML developers who wrote the schemas and the
business people who on the call or around the table and mentioned some
meaningful terms which they hope are reflected in the schema. (02)
In financial services I'm working on just such an ontology, though not
on behalf of any one existing message standard; rather the industry has
recognised the weaknesses in the XML and UML standardisation efforts and
funded (in a small way) the creation of an ontology that covers the
ground covered by these message standards. This means that the
governance benefits aren't immediately there for the individual
standards bodies, but that can follow after. (03)
Interestingly in order to create this I have had to deal with the issue
of the upper ontology. SUMO diverges too quickly (In my humble opinion)
into industry verticals, whereas to create basic building blocks of
meaning I find it makes more sense to define a set of primitive and not
so primitive types of "thing" such as contracts, legal entities, values,
dates, etc. etc. within various upper subject areas like legal,
mathametical, geographical and so on. I was hoping to find a lot more
reusable stuff for these upper layers (I've drawn on XBRL for financial
fundamentals, and intend to align more closely with REA on business
transactions for example). Otherwise I'm mostly using common sense
concepts that I believe are widely enough shared to be uncontroversial.
That is not ideal. (04)
So perhaps there is a case for identifying some basic, universally held
semantic building blocks that can be useful across many industries. If
so, this would need to be driven from a prior initiative in each of
those industries to bring their own existing XML message standards under
control before they fall apart and become unusable. That's where the
realistic business driver is to be found, but we can only really start
to talk about upper ontology structures once the industry-specific
problems are being addressed. Those efforts will come up with upper
ontology needs soon enough (unless the just read the Pizza ontology
example and make everything in their world a sub-class of Thing). (05)
Perhaps the material we have created for the financial industry would be
a useful starting point, but there is a lot that can be improved. Some
of that "upper" material, like math, will be the subject of existing XML
schema standards that can first be tamed and ontologised. I understand
that we might see an OWL ontology for XBRL at some point for example. (06)
So I guess we are not talking about using ontologies as standards, but
defining standards as ontologies. Or at least I am. (07)
Mike (08)
Francis McCabe wrote:
> On the original topic, I assumed that this was about using ontologies
> in standards.
>
> I think that this is, in principle, an excellent idea. And it has no
> dependency on 'upper ontologies'.
>
> Most standards specifications introduce terminology as well as
> defining conformance points. Nearly all the time, the terminology
> (concepts and relationships) are introduced very informally. Using
> formal techniques is potentially very helpful for this.
>
> There are a couple of interesting examples of this; some people may be
> aware of the Open Group's SOA Ontology. This is really an attempt to
> define some SOA architectural concepts using the formal framework of
> OWL. (Personal note, I am *definitely* not an apologist for the OG
> work; I have a number of issues with it.)
>
> Another example, the OASIS SOA Reference Model is a fairly influential
> document that introduces quite a lot of terminology. At one point we
> considered the use of OWL to formally define and relate the terms that
> we were using. We chose to go with the more informal concept maps
> instead; mostly because we (a) did not have the resources to make the
> effort and (b) did not feel that our audience would appreciate the
> effort.
>
> In fact, the upcoming work by the OASIS Semantic Web Services TC on
> the Reference Ontology for Semantic Web Services is supposed to be the
> spec of a standard ontology; but is, in many ways, more like a
> formalization of the SOA RM. (Again, I am not implying any judgement
> on the merits of the specification itself.)
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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