Quite the discussion! (01)
That said, I side with Ron in terms of being pragmatic within the standards
domain regarding ontologies and content/modeling standards. (02)
The OGC Members have for years struggled with semantics issues related to
the sharing of geographic content. Based on hard work by many OGC members
and and non-members, there appears to be a very workable and pragmatic
process emerging that works. (03)
The following presentation was given at a conference this past summer. The
presentation describes the evolution of GeoSciML - a content model and
related GML application schema for sharing geological structure, lithology,
and bore hole data. GeoSciML is now an international standard. (04)
http://www.ec-gis.org/Workshops/inspire_2008/presentations/08_04_Serrano.pdf (05)
Anyway, GeoSciMl originally started as a research project by CSIRO
(Australia) to solve a data sharing problem in the hard rock mining
community. Turns out each authority had a different way of describing basic
elements of any bore hole record, so data sharing of bore hole was
difficult. Seeking a solution, CSIRO got a bunch of hard rock geologists
experts together from that community and they defined an ontology and from
the agreed upon ontology were able to define a full content model and then
encoded as XML Schema using the the OGC Geography Markup Language. This
project was so successful that a number of national Geological
organizations, such as Geosciences Australia, USGS, BGRM (French geological)
agreed to work on a single ontology for geology. They determined that a
standard ontology was needed in order to share geological data between
countries, organizations, and so forth. This effort took about two years.
The end results was an agreed to ontology, a content model, and XML schema
(again using GML) for actually encoding geology data based on the content
model and ontology. They they ran an interoperability test to actually make
sure that geology data could actually be shared between Geological agencies.
Success - hard - but success. And all standards based. (06)
There is now an international portal called OneGeology that is totally
standards based. (07)
Now, behind the scenes is something called INSPIRE - the Pan-European
spatial data infrastructure policy that is helping to drive much of this
work. (08)
There is now similar work being done for the aeronautical charting
community, the meteorological community, the oceans sensor community, the
hydrology community, and many others. (09)
Essentially, they are doing as Ron suggests: (010)
> I hope that this will lead to multiple sets of ontologies that have been
> reviewed and informally "certified" to be internally consistent at least
> to the point where one can make assertions like: (011)
Now, in terms of actual location elements (geography), what is really cool
is that all of these activities are using the same ontology as defined in
ISO 19107 as implemented in the OGC Geography MarkUp Language. This allows
for some high degree of cross community use (interoperability) of these
models. Even nicer is that any product that can ingest GML automatically can
ingest content from any of these communities! (012)
Cheers (013)
Carl (014)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ron Wheeler" <rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 7:26 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Next steps in using ontologies as standards (015)
> Len Yabloko wrote:
>> Ron and all,
>>
>>> You mean that you actually want to do something practical? Have we run
>>> out of "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" discussions?
>>>
>>>
>> I know of at least one commercial efforts that is attempting to collect
>> many ontologies under the same umbrella and make it useful and practical.
>> I am talking about http://www.freebase.com/explore
>>
>> I the past there were similar efforts undertaken by MIT medial lab, but I
>> don't remember exact name and url. It was allowing anyone to make basic
>> statements in English.
>>
>> The reason I am mentioning this is because there is no lack of practical
>> efforts in unifying common knowledge. However, this problem requires
>> different approach then simply "let's do it", as should be obvious to
>> anyone following this field.
>>
>>
> I have been following the discussion and perhaps am being a bit harsh.
> There are some very good and important points being raised and some of
> them are no doubt important to advancing the field.
>
> I am a bit more oriented toward the practical side (perhaps I just don't
> have anything to contribute to angel choreography).
>
> I am beginning to get the strong sense that there is no possibility of
> one all-encompassing FO and that the best service to mankind, that I can
> contribute to, is the provision of a place where ontologies can be
> recorded and discussed.
>
> I hope that this will lead to multiple sets of ontologies that have been
> reviewed and informally "certified" to be internally consistent at least
> to the point where one can make assertions like:
>
> "If you take these 3 ontologies and use them together, there will not be
> any internal inconsistencies that will make your project do stupid or
> surprising things." or
> "If you use Ontology A with Ontology B, you will have to adjust these 7
> terms to make the ontologies consistent before you start to add your
> ontological entries."
> "If you try to use Ontology X in North America, you will want to adjust
> these 27 terms to align them with SOX terminology."
>
> I may be wrong but I think that this is one of the biggest problems
> facing application developers. There are tons of ontologies but no place
> that can tell you which ones will suit your needs or which ones are
> designed to work together.
>
> I would suggest the wiki rather than some centrally controlled database
> since I think that there are so many areas covered by ontologies, it
> will be hard to put together a expert group that can decide what is true
> and what is not true. A wiki allows the community to contribute and
> evaluate the content. I think that it would be hard to get a consensus
> about what group of people are responsible for all human knowledge.
> It has worked fairly well for Wikipedia and in the end the error rate in
> Wikipedia is pretty close to most major encyclopedias but the content
> grow much faster.
>
> I would like the effort to be open source and have as wide a base of
> contributors as possible.
> Is there some other approach besides the wiki that is better?
> Are the additional sections that the wiki should include?
> Are any of the sections that I proposed silly or not required?
>
> Perhaps we can devote 2009 and 2010 to describing the repository
> structure. Shall we switch the angels or change the pin dimensions?
>
>
>> This is why I recommend you to try to understand the question rather than
>> describe it as "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?". This is
>> not what people here are trying to do.
>>
>>
> I think that there are many different things that people are trying to
> do. Some of them are worthwhile as basic research but not as practical
> advice for someone who needs a solution to an immediate problem.
> There is no doubt that a cancer patient benefits from a lot of research
> that was done in ivory towers but the effort spent in the training of
> the attending medical team is also important.
> I do not object to angel choreography in principle, but I do see that
> there is a lot of very useful knowledge being discussed here that would
> be helpful to people with real problems if we had a place to construct
> it into actionable information.
>
> There is no shortage of ontologies at the moment. They are just too hard
> to find and evaluate.
>
>>> Perhaps a good start might be to make a wiki with:
>>> - 1 page for each ontology
>>> - a sensible and easily extensible set of categories to group them
>>> together
>>> - a section of pages for comparisons and analysis with link to the
>>> ontology pages
>>> - sections for candidate sets of ontologies that might make up
>>> reasonable FOs (in case hell does not freeze over or $10 million fails
>>> to fall out of the sky) for someone
>>> - pages to discussions of the comparison of the FO candidate sets.
>>>
>>> I think that a wiki would do the job and let everyone participate. It
>>> would be easy to add new ontologies (or links to ontologies) and make
>>> "peer" review very easy.
>>>
>>> I have used MediaWiki (Wikipedia's wiki tool) for a couple of sites and
>>> it is easy to set up and fairly intuitive to use.
>>> If it would help, I would be happy to host it.
>>>
>>> We could also just do this on the Wikipedia site if they do not object
>>> to the amount of pages that this would add.
>>>
>>>
>>> Ron
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
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