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Pat,
Granted the theories are the best tools and
instruments, kindly specify your two alternative proposals:
"Using
ontologies as a tool in the business of writing standards"
"Standardizing the business of writing ontologies themselves".
Thanks.
Azamat
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 8:43
PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] standard
ontology
Umm... I am confused (and I apologize for missing the telecon that might
have unconfused me.) The topic for the current Summit mixes the topics of
'ontology' and 'standards'. But this can be understood in several rather
different ways.
(1) Using ontologies as a tool in the business of writing standards.
Here, 'writing standards' is a broadly conceived topic area, and the standards
might refer to almost anything. For example, someone might argue that the
business of writing standards for future high-speed USB communication
protocols would benefit from the participants writing and using ontologies, or
perhaps a particular ontology.
(2) Defining, or approaching the definition of, a standard ontology. This
would presumably be some variety of 'unified upper level' or 'comprehensive'
ontology, or perhaps a collection of related ontologies, etc.., of the kind
developed as part of the Cyc project or the SUMO effort, or as proposed by Pat
Cassidy or Azamat in previous postings.
(3) Standardizing the business of writing ontologies themselves. This
would presumably link with our previous focus on ontology repositories, where
a strong theme emerged of "quality control" for ontologies, and several
nascent ontology-writing methodologies, or at least collections of
good-practice rules and maxims, seemed to be visible in the general
intellectual murk.
If I follow Azamat and Ravi's messages, below, they seem (?) to be
talking about (2), but I'm not sure that this is the intended interpretation
for the Summit.
Pater, can you confirm/clarify?
Pat Hayes
------
On Feb 9, 2009, at 11:3
9 AM, Azamat wrote:
On Saturday, February 07, 2009 7:32 PM, Ravi
wrote:
"how close are we to agreeing on a few approaches for "standards"
that most ontology formalisms would consider "Essential" for
Communication..."
Not very close. Still the nasty and rocky issues of the
standard model have to be resolved. Some of them are:
Which basic categories of things go as the canonical classes of
entities and relationships?
What is the basic level of the standard scheme?
Are the standard categories defined by members (extension) or
properties (intension);
How the standard classes are organized?
How domain ontologies and data models are structured
by standard ontology?
What formal languages are most effective to represent the standard
classes and relations?
Besides, there is the question of questions: what is the nature of
standard ontology, is it about the real world categorization:
arranging, grouping, or distributing all things and items into standard
categories according to their natural relationships. Or, it is something
else, unified metadata scheme, canonic information reference, global data
model, etc.?
So, it appears there is still some work to do.
Regards,
Azamat Abdoullaev
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, February 07, 2009 7:32
PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Is there
something I missed?
John, Azamat, Pat and other participants and contributors:
Though a late entrant and guilty of not having read the full thread:
So, how close are we to agreeing on a few approaches for "standards"
that most ontology formalisms would consider "Essential" for
Communication (and inter operation if machine interpreted- a category of
high relevance today) and "Desirable" or "Nice to Have". Would these be
approached from "Meta-data" or "attributes" discussed some time ago,
or would these specify items such as XML, OWL, UML etc? Where do we start
(Context, Concept), Triples based "things"and "relationships", how far we
go to connect to CL, FOL, etc.? For some of us, practical hints, even if
these need to go to more mature standards later, are helpful, and Steve
Ray would also appreciate them as we are closer to next Summit!
Best Regards.
--
Thanks.
Ravi
(Dr. Ravi
Sharma)
313 204 1740 Mobile
On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 11:51 AM, John F. Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ron
and Azamat,
It's important to have an appropriate balance between
talk and action.
RW> It appears that there is very little
enthusiasm for real work here.
> Endless arguments around the edges of each
topic seem to be the
> flavour of the month. There is very
little interest is highlighting
> areas of agreement except
to buttress some argument against someone
> else's
ideas.
I sympathize with that complaint.
AA> ... the
Forum happened to collect most advanced minds in the
> sphere of ontology and ontology
engineering. With high
> organization, the Group can
solve most challenging tasks,
> delivering outstanding
products.
I agree with the word 'can'. The group has
the *potential* to
do something important, but there are many email
groups like this
one that have had good participants, but very little
*observable*
results. I emphasized the word 'observable',
because many ideas
that people learn from a book, university, or
discussion group
may eventually be transformed into
action.
One thing that facilitates the transfer of ideas into
action is
*money*. An enlightened manager with sufficient
funding can often
transform good ideas into outstanding products.
But misguided
managers can produce disasters. And to
protect the guilty, I
won't cite some cases where the same manager
pushed a good idea
to a brilliant success, was promoted to a more
powerful position,
and later pushed some bad ideas to
disaster.
AA> In many Russian village, you may find places
where few local
> senior women, babushkas, sit all day
talking about nothing.
> The content and the purpose are of
little importance. What is
> important, the act of
exchanging rumors, anecdotes, and gossips,
> the process of
conversation. Usually, these closed country fora
> led
by gabbiest babushkas, full of trivial news.
I don't want
to defend everything that the babushki discuss, but
there have been
sociological studies that show the importance of
seemingly trivial
gossip. If you type "gossip sociology" to Google,
you'll get
over a million hits. Following is the first one:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-19960701-000035.html
The real slant on gossip
Some excerpts below.
If you
just read the published literature, you can gather a great
deal of
important detail that has been well reviewed and edited.
But you also
get a lot of mediocre writing that was reviewed,
considered
moderately acceptable, and never proved to be useful.
But there
are several important things you don't get:
1. Detailed
debate that evaluates the ideas and provides personal
experience about how those ideas worked out in practice.
2.
Disasters, which the people involved almost never want to
publish and the people who were not involved seldom
have
enough information to analyze and
explain.
3. Guidelines about how to act in similar
situations and which
people to trust, collaborate with,
or avoid.
The babushki are ruthless in stating their opinions
about all
such issues that affect their daily lives. Many of
those issues
may be trivial on a grand scale, but they can be
critical for
their village or neighborhood.
We have had a lot
of useful "gossip" and information on this list,
but I agree with Ron
that we need to develop a more effective
way to transfer the good
ideas into
action.
John
___________________________________________________________________
Focuses
on the benefits from gossiping. Gossip in newspaper columns;
Primary
function of gossip; Gossip among preteens. INSET: The high-
tech
grapevine....
"For a real understanding of our social
environment, gossip is
essential," agrees Jack Levin, Ph.D.,
professor of sociology and
criminology at Boston's Northeastern
University and coauthor of
_Gossip: The Inside Scoop_. "Its
primary function is to help us
make social comparisons...."
In
the more than two dozen on-line rumors Bordia looked at for study
of
how rumors are transmitted via computer, he found that
"conversations"
have a typical pattern: First, they're tentatively
introduced,
generating, a flurry of requests for information. Next,
facts and
personal experiences get shared and the group tries to
verify the
rumor's veracity. Finally, the group breaks up or moves on
to another topic.
C. Lee Harrington, a professor of sociology at
Miami University in
Ohio, who's conducted her own cybergossip survey,
concurs. She says chat
room enthusiasts, like ordinary gossipers,
"attempt to establish the
veracity of the information they're sharing
through references to
outside sources. They rely on secondary
sources, refer to personal
knowledge and relationships, or, as is the
case with entertainment
gossip, claim to have direct connections to
it, accounting for their
'inside information.'"
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