Dear Mike, (01)
> I agree. Speaking as one of those people from that part of the world
> that is not called America, we don't need Congress to make it all
> happen. Some of us even helped the US to win WWII if I recall :-)
>
> Where the action and the benefit is, as I see it, is in having
> something
> that existing standards bodies (both industry standards bodies and ISO)
> can use. Many of the standards groups have been using XML, and then
> UML,
> and are starting to recognise that meaning is the problem not
> technology. So there are plenty of examples, both as industry consortia
> and ISO committees (and ISO has a mechanism for industry bodies as well
> as countries to be involved in standards setting). (02)
[MW] For example, I think it would be relatively straightforward for the
ONTOLOG forum to become a Liaison to ISO TC184/SC4 - Industrial Data, since
there are a significant number of people who are members of both
communities. This would give us a formal voice at the standards setting
table. (03)
[MW] <snip> (04)
> Where we can have fun and do something useful as I see it is:
>
> 1. Show some leadership in helping industry bodies to capture and model
> their business semantics in ways which are complete, logically
> consistent and can be owned, reviewed and updated by business SMEs
> (but:
> 1a. given that OWL and so on don't really meet that requirement,
> figure out a useful answer before the inustry bodies get bored and move
> away - currently they think OWL is it because this is the hot new thing
> in buzzword heaven); (05)
[MW] Well there is Common Logic of course, but having the answer doesn't
mean people are going to use it. (06)
> 2. Deal with the common terms that form the simple semantic building
> blocks that those different industry groups might want to build
> semantics from, for example financial building blocks (use XBRL - no
> question), maths terms, country, currency, all that simple stuff. Also
> common things like risk, payment, liability etc. that form the basic
> terms that any business entity has to relate to. Like "business
> entity". (07)
[MW] Unfortunately, a lot of that stuff is not simple at all, and there are
lots of people around reinventing these things for different purposes that
will not necessarily be reusable by others in different contexts. I think
the real challenge here is to work with the authoritative source for these
things, so with units of measure an organization like BIPM to work out what
they are really standardizing. The easy bit is agreeing to represent the
metre by "m". This difficult bit is understanding what a unit of measure is
in the first place.
>
> Granted that (2) reignites the "primitives" debate which isn't my
> intention here, but I do think that the SUMO ontology splits too early
> into industry verticals. As an example, to define financial
> instruments,
> one wants to use the basic concepts of contracts, contractual terms
> (which are a set of contractual clauses, and therefore a set),
> jurisdiction, equity (financial), debt (financial), cash flows,
> schedules (events + time), variable parameters (for interest rates,
> indices) etc. etc. (08)
[MW] Yes, when I was developing Shell's Downstream Data Model we did this.
One of the things we found quite important (but didn't necessarily manage in
every case) was to identify the different levels of abstraction
(generalization) that it was useful to have. We identified (at least) 3. (09)
1. An upper ontology level (including wholes and parts, subtype/supertype,
classification, representation, time, and physical quantities). (010)
2. A generic level (contract, party, product, ...) (011)
3. A business (domain) terminology level (employee, customer, luboil, Crude
Oil Carrier,...) (012)
>
> If we can work out how to help with these two simple tasks, and help
> develop and improve the standards to accommodate 1a (for example I've
> been using an OWL-based thing but I've added the concept of archetypes,
> renamed everything in English, and output it in in diagrams and
> spreadsheets - surely OWL can be extended in these ways), then we will
> have something useful to offer which industry bodies in the different
> industry sectors might be able to cobble together a few grand to do.
> This is what I have been doing in the financial industry - through a
> US-based global industry body called the Enterprise Data Management
> Council, who tentatively found just enough money to keep me alive and
> dry while I had a go at putting something together. Assuming it works
> and and be shown to add value, we can keep this up without ever having
> to ask Congress to scrape together a few billion for us to keep body
> and
> soul together :-) (013)
[MW] Well the DDM cost around US$1m, so that is not exactly peanuts, but it
could probably be repeated for less having learnt a lot from doing it once
already. (014)
Regards (015)
Matthew West
Information Junction
Tel: +44 560 302 3685
Mobile: +44 750 3385279
matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/ (016)
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>
> Mike
>
> Anders W.Tell wrote:
> > Rich Cooper wrote:
> >
> >> I think we should focus on the why, the value, and the project level
> >> concepts of ontology engineering.
> >>
> >>
> >
> > I would like to propose a *supplementatry* strategy in a value based
> > approach. It is not always necessary to create large projects that
> > invents a new set theory, a new interchange format, a new
> foundational
> > ontology or to asks an organization to throw out their old works and
> > start fresh or any other heavy weight task.
> >
> > Why not suggest to the ontologicaly challanged to smoothly
> incorporate
> > *parts* of existing onto-logical methods , principles, etc into their
> > upcoming workstreams.
> >
> > A key part here is that the work products should be
> > compartmentalised/partitioned/contextualised/... so that the
> qualities
> > of understandability and acceptability are addressed. Mush of
> existing
> > work is too much, to big , too complex, too much "meta model or
> > ontology" (freighting words), for a business ontologies to
> comprehend
> > and use. Making the pieces smaller and documented with examples from
> the
> > spatio-temporal real word could go a long way.
> >
> >
> > thanks
> > /anders
> >
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>
>
> --
> Mike Bennett
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