Hi Matthew, (01)
Matthew West wrote:
> Dear Mike,
>
>
>> 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).
>>
>
> [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.
> (02)
Absolutely - category C or D Liaison is the route to follow I think. It
depends on the member countries and liaisons in a particular industry as
to whether we would have the relevant domain knowledge I suppose, but
given what you say about overlap that would be a good thing to look into. (03)
> [MW] <snip>
>
>
>> 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);
>>
>
> [MW] Well there is Common Logic of course, but having the answer doesn't
> mean people are going to use it.
> (04)
True enough. In particular though you need tools that business people
can own and use. John's Conceptual Graphs would be a good fit but I
don't know much about the tools in that area. (05)
Meanwhile because real people are using the OWL tools, some of the tools
vendors - under pressure from real users - are creating more intuitive
visual graphs and better report tables. (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".
>>
>
> [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.
> (07)
That's exactly the way to go, I agree. I found I had to create basic
semantic building blocks for all sorts of things, and I would hope to be
able to align with whatever is the best authoritative source for a given
area. For example, XBRL for financial terms once their stuff is
available in OWL or some other visible and non proprietary format. Again
the focus is on a legitimate business owner for the facts represented.
Also where available, I would want to align with good academoc work like
Bill McCarthy's REA material for transactions and economic behaviour. (08)
This possibly ties in with Ronald Stamper's concept of having an
"Affordance", whereby a class of thing is defined as real because it is
detected as such. Rather than the affording agency being simply
"society" it becomes a given industry body for accountancy, financial
securities and so on. That might ba feature worth adding to the
metamodel for an ontology definition language (be it CG, OWL or
whatever) whereby as well as being able to define logical relationships
among things, one can define where in the real world the thing is
asserted to have some meaning - very much in contrast with the Semantic
Web idea of anyone putting a URI to something to say that they say it
has meaning. (09)
>> 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.
>>
>
> [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.
> (010)
Me too, though I didn't name them or segregate them as such: (011)
> 1. An upper ontology level (including wholes and parts, subtype/supertype,
> classification, representation, time, and physical quantities).
> (012)
I used the top level of John Sowa's lattice for this, adding things like
Set, Part, Temporal Thing as required. My end result could probably be
more scientific though and would benefit from being replaced by
something anointed by the ontology community. (013)
> 2. A generic level (contract, party, product, ...)
> (014)
Here I followed Bill McCarthy's example and defined the things at this
level as archetypes (yet another non OWL feature). Then the necessary
facts about something like a contract are defined at this level, as well
as what sort of "Thing" contract is in terms of the 3 layers at Level 1
(continuant, independent etc.). Likewise for Jurisdiction etc. - there
should be well established definitions in international law for all
these, though I am still looking for these. There are quite a few such
things, so I separated them into Legal, Geographical, Mathematical and
so on, along with more loosely defined "Core" and "Business", all of
which could probably be sharpened up a lot by good ontology
practitioners. Meanwhile I needed them in place anyway. (015)
> 3. A business (domain) terminology level (employee, customer, luboil, Crude
> Oil Carrier,...)
> (016)
Exactly - this is then the ontology itself for the business (and in line
with the business standards and industry bodies for that group). (017)
So Levels 1 and 2 are where this group could add something. (018)
>
>> 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 :-)
>>
>
> [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.
> (019)
Well it cost me a lot less than that to eat for a year, so there must be
some useful middle ground. (020)
Best regards, (021)
Mike (022)
> Regards
>
> Matthew West
> Information Junction
> Tel: +44 560 302 3685
> Mobile: +44 750 3385279
> matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/
>
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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
>> Director
>> Hypercube Ltd.
>> 89 Worship Street
>> London EC2A 2BF
>> Tel: +44 (0) 20 7917 9522
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>> www.hypercube.co.uk
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>>
>>
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> (023)
--
Mike Bennett
Director
Hypercube Ltd.
89 Worship Street
London EC2A 2BF
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7917 9522
Mob: +44 (0) 7721 420 730
www.hypercube.co.uk
Registered in England and Wales No. 2461068 (024)
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