To my limited understanding of the nature of the ontological universe,
this makes a lot of sense and is likely to lead to real results and an
advancement of the art.
Do we have a list of ontologies that are supposed to represent some of
the major standards?
Are there key standards that need work?
How does this community engage with the standards bodies?
Can Patrick's idea of a community of ontological practice with funding,
find projects with the standards bodies? (01)
Is this something that this community can contribute to? (02)
Is Wikipedia the best place to start this list? I think that they
already have a list of known ontologies and links to places to find more. (03)
Where should the peer reviews and commentaries on ontologies purporting
to be accurate depictions of standards, be held?
Here? I am not sure that Wikipedia is a good place for this but links to
a comment and review site from Wikipedia would seem to be appropriate. (04)
ROn (05)
Mike Bennett wrote:
> I think that once one starts to look at what terms would need to be in
> the foundation ontology for any industry vertical effort, there are sets
> of terms that suggest themselves as being needed, and many of these may
> themselves be governed by some suitable authority already.
>
> As an example, in creating an ontology for the financial services
> industry (focusing on securities terms and definitions) I needed to have
> an upper ontology for the various more basic meanings that are
> specialised for existing standard securities terms. These included terms
> for time (for schedules), Legal, Geography (for countries, which among
> other things are issuers of certain sort of security) and so on. One
> area of particular interest was basic accounting terms, and these are
> handled by the XBRL standard. XBRL is interesting because it has what
> they call a taxonomy, but this is really a kind of ontology (or several
> jurisdiction-specific ontologies) implemented in XML using Xpath links.
> This means that for us to build an ontology that captures the business
> meanings behind the existing financial industry data and message
> standards, we needed to draw on terms in the XBRL existing standard.
>
> In order to capture business meanings for securities I have put together
> a framework of basic common terms covering financial, legal, time,
> geography, mathematics, information, business/commerce and a few others.
> I would expect in due course to find (and align with) terms managed by
> standards bodies for each of these, in the same way that most ontologies
> would expect to make use of FOAF and Dublin Core, but many of those are
> either not ontologies yet, or are written in some non standard ontology
> format as XBRL currently is.
>
> So I would not expect to find many unadopted sets of content for the
> material that other industry-specific ontologies need to draw on. For
> instance much of what is meaningful to a business is rooted in legal
> meanings (I think of legal as a sort of sensory input to the business),
> so there is a need for basic legal constructs like contract, law,
> jurisdiction, right etc., all of which must presumably be owned and
> defined by some legal community or standards body if we can find them.
>
> Where the work is I suggest, is in finding these communitis of practice
> and standards bodies and assisting them where needed to provide the
> business view that XML and UML and the like have not delivered for them,
> and in so doing, make their basic terms available for more specialized
> industries to derive meanings from.
>
> I think it would be a mistake to think of all industries as being at the
> same "level" in any taxonomic hierarchy of the things they deal with,
> and of there being some level above this where there is nothing. That
> may be how the world is organised but it is not how the facts that
> different domains deal with are related. So for example a financial
> security is a kind of contract, which is a basic legal construct, but
> law is an industry as well, with people who must already have
> definitions for those terms. Only the level directly below "Thing" is
> not looked after by any existing community or standard, and that means
> maybe half a dozen terms.
>
> In this way, to follow your example, the widget community would know
> that there is no sense in simply declaring Widget to be a direct
> sub-class of Thing, but would look to the general manufacture
> standardisation effort, find their "Man Made Object" and use that as a
> parent class in their ontology (or maybe find there is a more
> specialised "Factory Made Object"). This would enable them to generate
> widget messages as before, but also relate these to their ontology where
> the meaning of widget is formally established to as to avoid collisions
> with the new Truncated Grumlet message that someone in their community
> wants to add to their standard. That being the business case for having
> an ontology in the first place.
>
> Mike
>
> Ian Bailey wrote:
>
>> Hi Pat, Matthew,
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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 ;)
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Cheers
>> --
>> Ian
>>
>> -----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
>>
>> Dear PatC,
>>
>>
>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>>
>> [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.
>>
>> 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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>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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