Hi Pat, Matthew, (01)
I'm not sure completeness and/or scope is necessarily a major problem. Some
degree of semantic correlation can be achieved by mapping to higher levels
in the specialisation hierarchy - e.g. your ontology might not have "widget"
in it, but it does have "man made object", so I can simply add widget to the
ontology as a subtype of it, and grow the scope of the ontology as I go on.
We followed pretty much this process with IDEAS, using DoDAF, MODAF and
DNDAF as the sources which fed into IDEAS. (02)
The problem we encountered is one of usage - i.e. how the users and vendors
interpreted the standards (in this case DoDAF, MODAF and DNDAF). In SC4
alone, there are a lot of models which are similar, but often used
differently. First of all, each application protocol has used the SC4
integrated resource models differently (occasionally, there is commonality
between APs that had to interoperate). Secondly, different implementations
of the same AP often interpret it differently...then the users often add
their own interpretations and workarounds. (03)
My point is that you can't do a proper semantic analysis by looking at the
data models alone - you need to get your hands dirty and look at the legacy
data. You can carry out academic exercises mapping models and doing gap
analyses, but these never work when it comes to the real world. And this is
just for SC4, where the models are very well defined (if a little byzantine
in places). I made a living for a number of years hoovering up and mapping
legacy data - I quickly learned to ignore the data models and look at what
the users had actually put in the tables. When I first read Chris
Partridge's book, it was his forensic approach that really appealed to me as
a practitioner. It took me a bit longer to believe in all that ontology
nonsense mind you ;) (04)
Another point, and perhaps this is specific to SC4, is that engineering data
seems to lend itself very well to extensional ontologies - there are lots of
physical things, and types of physical things to deal with, and precision in
identification is crucial. SC4 already has an extensional ontology in
ISO15926. I don't do much work outside of the engineering domain so I'd be
interested to know if anyone has similar feelings about what types of
ontology suit other domains the best - e.g. finance, HR, etc. (05)
Cheers
--
Ian (06)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Matthew West
Sent: 10 February 2009 08:56
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] standard ontology (07)
Dear PatC, (08)
>
> There is one problem I have with this effort at using ontologies to
> help
> define or organize standards; there is as yet no standard for an
> ontology
> that has a enough content to actually represent all the things that the
> non-ontology standards talk about. Apart from the droll situation of a
> community without a standard trying to formalize the knowledge of
> communities with a standard, there is the practical question of whether
> we
> intend to recommend one foundation ontology as the basis for the
> formalization, or take a hands-off position and let a thousand
> incompatible
> flowers bloom? I don't recall whether there is a consensus on this
> point. (09)
[MW] The way I would see it, it is about who is responsible for what, so
rather than having a thousand ontologies for units of measure, we get BIPM,
or the relevant ISO committee they develop their standards through to
develop it, and the rest of us just use it. (010)
Regards (011)
Matthew West
Information Junction
Tel: +44 560 302 3685
Mobile: +44 750 3385279
matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/ (012)
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