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PH: is your rhetorical point that there is no real distinction between
these, or that the first activity necessarily requires the second?
First, a rhetorical question is designed to produce an effect, while i am
trying to elicit some useful reply from you, without allusions and
analogies.
Second, ontological tools presuppose ontological theories, some
fundamental knowledge, as any advanced engineerring tools
(electromechanical devices) necessitate scientific theories (Maxwell's
equations).
Azamat
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009 10:32
PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] standard
ontology
On Feb 10, 2009, at 2:07 PM, Azamat wrote:
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".
Sorry, Im not understanding what
you want me to do. Did I not specify them in the previous message?
Or is your rhetorical point that there is no real distinction between
these, or that the first activity necessarily requires the second? If so, I
disagree. I would again point to the analogy of writing programs, where there
is no 'standard' way to implement systems, but nevertheless, systems can be
implemented which may be of utility in the standards-writing business. And we
have some experience here to guide us: ontologies of limited scope have proven
to be useful in many applications, but no 'standard' such ontology exists
which can be applied to all cases, with the possible exceptions of Cyc and
SUMO; and yet, one does not find that users of limited-scope ontologies find
these comprehensive ontologies to be a great deal of use, in practice. The
work involved in adapting the previously-formalized knowledge to the
particular case is often greater than what it would take to reconstruct a
suitable upper level from scratch.
Pat
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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