Patrick Cassidy wrote:
> My difficulty with just waiting until some "large and economically important
> community of practice" evolves is, that on the basis of the experience of
> the past fifteen years, this process could take several decades, or longer. (01)
Do I understand Pat to say that there won't be significant commercial
interests that depend on ontologies for "several decades"? That would
argue strongly against the significance of "foundation ontologies" for
the same time period. (02)
> If here is any truth to the estimate that lack of semantic interoperability
> costs the country $100 billion per year in lost productivity, then it
> appears to me to be foolishness to let a few trillion dollars of losses
> accumulate rather than to attack the problem directly by creating that
> "community of practice" by funding its creation. (03)
I agree with this, at least in principle. Where we can see value in
creating ontologies for use in various interactions in some domain, it
is appropriate to fund their development. The biosciences and medical
communities have done a great deal in that very regard. And they have
expanding communities of practice. We NIST see value in constructing
"supply chain" and "logistics" ontologies for improving semantic
interoperability in software involved in international trade; and we are
trying to support that. And there are other such activities in
agriculture, finance, military and "intelligence". (04)
But most of those activities have not found "upper ontologies" useful in
constructing their domain ontologies. Our experience is that there is
no disagreement in the understanding that an engine block is a physical
object that is counted, while oil is a physical substance that is sold
in volumes or weights. The disagreement is in whether a shipment
becomes two shipments when it is split at a consolidation center, and in
exactly who has which responsibilities in "change of ownership at the
dock", and in which actual event determines the date that starts the
clock on a 30-day forfeiture clause. The upper ontologies are directed
toward concerns of the former kinds, which are _not_ semantic
interoperability issues, but not with the latter kinds, which _are_
semantic interoperability issues. (05)
> That is the essence of the
> proposal that we fund a consortium of 100 or so participants who will
> develop, and then test in their own applications, some foundation ontology
> suitable to all of them. The sooner such a community does develop, the
> sooner the benefits of a common ontology can begin to be felt. (06)
Pat mistakes creating a consortium of 100 participants whose ostensible
purpose is to create a "foundation ontology" for "creating communities
of practice". It is very likely that these people will represent 30
different communities of interest, and at least 3 of them will be pure
philosopher gangs who are all about consistency with varios sacred
theories and disagree with each other. Communities of practice _use_ an
ontology and derive benefit from it. How will these folk use the
foundation ontology and derive benefit from it? What will it enable
that they aren't already doing in their application community? (07)
But perhaps I misunderstand. The 100 people can't possibly be drawn
from existing communities of practice of any significance, because such
communities don't exist now, and won't exist for several decades. Right? (08)
> One might argue with the estimate of losses due to semantic interoperability (09)
No one argues with the losses. The question is: How does creating a
"foundation ontology" by funding 100 people reduce those losses? and by
how much? (010)
We have created 5 or 6 "upper" or "foundation" ontologies, without yet
creating significant communities of practice for them, or seeing any
reduction in the "semantic interoperability" cost. Like XML and
Webservices, they don't of themselves solve any "semantic
interoperability" problem. But unlike XML and Webservices, they don't
solve any other interoperability problem, either. (011)
It is probably not worth spending 50M$ on SETI trying to contact an
alien civilization that has already solved the problem and could teach
us how. Is funding the 100 people more likely to produce a solution? (012)
> Waiting is not cost-effective. Why lose all that time? (013)
As one who has spent 7 years of his professional life developing
international standards that no one ever really used, I can say that
making another standard for no known user community is wasting the real
time of real people -- truly losing that time. It is not what anyone
with any real competence should be doing. (014)
But it may be beneficial to many communities of practice to spend the
money to put 100 selected individuals in a room to develop a worthless
standard, so that they stop interfering with worthwhile efforts. ;-) (015)
-Ed (016)
--
Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263 Tel: +1 301-975-3528
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263 FAX: +1 301-975-4694 (017)
"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
and have not been reviewed by any Government authority." (018)
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