Don,
I agree with much of the sentiment in your note, but need to respond to
two points: (01)
> [DC] I'll start from the end of your last post. There is little point in
repeatedly referring to lost productivity on a grand scale when there is no
one concerned about it who has the resources to address it. The closest
match would require a call to 202-456-1414, ask for Obama. Good luck with
that. (02)
Well, it may come to that, but I am hoping that someone at a lower level
will pay attention. One problem illustrated by this thread is that it may
first be necessary to break through the noise generated by people who either
(a) give up without trying because they assume that it is sociologically
impossible, without any real evidence; or (b) before agreeing that it is a
good idea to try, want to see some demonstration of feasibility that would
take at least as much effort and money as the project itself. I had hoped
that this group could seriously discuss the technical issues, but I only
seem to get reruns of the 3D/4D debate, in spite of extensive discussion in
which no example has been given that there is actually some practical
information that cannot be translated between those two ways of looking at
the world. (03)
>> > It will take a near gorilla campaign of small successful semantic
> projects time to prove themselves while the supporting infrastructure
> matures.
>
Perhaps it will have to wait for that, but I am suggesting a project that
could greatly accelerate the process. The consortium developed by the FO
proposal can't substitute for a much wider community that includes
university IT departments that teach ontology along with other information
management techniques, but it can hasten the day when such departments are
widespread, by demonstrating that the interoperability problems they deal
with can be addressed effectively by ontologies, and demonstrate how a
common foundation Ontology can provide the bridge among local knowledge
representations. (04)
I think there is a lot of point in repeating over and over again the point
about economic losses from inaction, because the main issue that bothers
many people is that the cost of a consortium FO program is relatively high.
The point I will emphasize, every time I hear such an argument, is that the
cost of *not* undertaking such a program (or multiple such programs, if any
others are proposed) is even higher. That's important enough to repeat. (05)
Pat (06)
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx (07)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Conklin, Don
> Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 9:59 PM
> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] standard ontology
>
> Pat,
>
> I'll start from the end of your last post. There is little point in
> repeatedly referring to lost productivity on a grand scale when there
> is no one concerned about it who has the resources to address it. The
> closest match would require a call to 202-456-1414, ask for Obama. Good
> luck with that.
>
> My experiences with DOD affirm your comment in that they want an order
> of magnitude advance from semantic technologies. But the hard truth is
> that the more tightly a domain is focused, the more a relational DB
> solution will equal, or better a semantic solution. At much less cost
> and difficulty.
>
> The DOD entities I've dealt with typically seek to integrate some
> number of relational DB's, sometimes with unstructured data. But within
> a fairly tight domain (yes, there is a range to the domain focus).
>
> Interoperability, while given much lip service, lags the commercial
> world. The DOD XML Registry was going to be the solution...still
> waiting on that one. By the way, where is the ontology repository and
> how capable is it?
>
> Fielding large scale, operational semantic systems is not yet feasible
> because the supporting infrastructure is not in place. For example,
> look in the Sunday paper job ads for oracle DB administrators. Then
> look for ontologist ads...
>
> Unfortunately, as it takes money to make money, success breeds success.
> Fielded semantic systems that work will garner more funds for the
> application of those technologies.
>
> It would be great if the federal government CIO announced a major drive
> to develop and field semantic technologies. I'm not holding my breath
> and he is a lot more worried about the next windows virus that
> decimates federal PC's.
>
> It will take a near gorilla campaign of small successful semantic
> projects time to prove themselves while the supporting infrastructure
> matures.
>
> The same way that Apple makes sound loops available in garage bands for
> neophytes to compose into music may be a model for non-ontologists to
> grab pertinent ontologies to compose into domain ontologies. Then there
> will be a customer pull for the techologies often discussed here.
>
> This was a hellofa long email to type on a blackberry. Good thing my
> flight was delayed.
>
> Don
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <ontolog-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: '[ontolog-forum] ' <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Fri Feb 20 17:09:34 2009
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] standard ontology
>
> Just one point here:
>
> [JS] > And if Pat seriously believes that it's necessary to adopt some
> > upper ontology ASAP, I can't understand why he doesn't recommend
> > Cyc instead of starting from scratch.
> >
> Yea gods, how many times do I need to repeat that we are not
> starting
> from scratch, but using *everything* freely usable from the OpenCyc???
> Come
> on, read my postings for their content, not just to find lines to argue
> with.
> I have already detailed reasons why Cyc in its present form and
> with
> its present management cannot serve as a common foundation ontology
> acceptable to a broad community. It seems you haven't read my
> point-by-point enumeration of the reasons. At a minimum, the common FO
> must
> be maintained by an open consortium of users, not by a central profit-
> making
> organization. And the point of the FO project is not to develop a
> replacement for Cyc, which is likely to continue in its present form
> for the
> foreseeable future, but to develop a community that uses some FO that
> can
> translate from Cyc and any other ontology into each other, and to
> demonstrate its usefulness by producing open-source applications and
> utilities, especially an NL interface, to make it easier to use. Such a
> community and such demo applications do not now exist for any
> foundation
> ontology. I have said repeatedly that if there were a broadly
> representative community of users that openly shared their applications
> and
> utilities, any competent foundation ontology, including Cyc, could be
> used
> as a starting point, only modified as required to support translation
> and
> serve to allow the users' systems to transmit information to each other.
>
> One of the things we should have learned from the experience of Cyc
> and
> other work on upper ontologies is that the foundation ontology needs to
> be
> freely usable, but even that is not enough. An FO serves as a
> language to
> support communication among computers, and every useful language is
> maintained by the community of users to be sure it suits their evolving
> purposes. Central control is too inflexible - what is needed is a
> process
> that allows input from every source, but that also maintains a core
> component that is logically consistent, because computer communication
> can
> and should be highly accurate. That notion of process argues for a
> completely open consortium of contributors, with a technical committee
> responsible for maintaining the quality of the FO.
>
> Where Doug's original model failed is that he thought that he only had
> to
> develop a competent ontology, and could then license it to users. The
> problem, we have discovered, is that using a complex ontology to good
> effect
> is just as complicated as building the ontology in the first place, and
> as a
> result users with applications important enough to pay license fees,
> for
> which the managers are convinced that the ontology will pay its way,
> will be
> very slow in arriving. This says nothing about the usefulness or
> quality of
> the ontology, and a lot about how much work is required to implement a
> complex technology in a practical application.
>
> Why is it so hard to use an ontology to create impressive applications?
> >From comments I have heard within the DoD, it appears that anything
> that
> does not approach human-level understanding in sophistication will be
> almost
> indistinguishable from the managerial view from ordinary RDB's or
> ordinary
> applications, and there are a lot more people who know how to do RDB's
> and
> traditional programming. Inertia is immense. Getting someone to put
> up
> money to prove that the ontology will help their applications is very
> hard.
> There are some projects, but they are confidential and cannot be talked
> about.
>
> As an example, consider language understanding. A good language
> understanding program that could read a text and answer questions, and
> also
> hold a coherent conversation, even (as JS points out) at a five-year
> old
> level might be impressive enough. But what would it take to create
> such a
> program? One architecture I favor is to have an NLU program highly
> modularized, so that individual modules can be improved and replaced to
> evolve a more powerful system, with an unlimited number of people
> working on
> the system, if it is open-source. But language understanding is
> complex,
> and I believe that the complexity will be at a minimum that which would
> be
> associated with a "lexical-syntactic expert" approach, in which many,
> perhaps most individual words will have to be interpreted by "expert"
> modules designed specifically for individual words, phrases,
> grammatical
> constructions, and contexts. Reasonable fluency at a minimal level
> will
> require a good understanding of at least 5,000 words. My best
> guess-estimate of how long it would take for a programmer (perhaps in
> consultation with an ontologist) to write and debug such an "expert"
> module
> would be one or two weeks. Take the lower number, and we get 5,000
> person-weeks. Double that to allow for the work required to manage the
> interactions of such modules, result 10,000 person-weeks, or 200
> person-years. I also suspect that *any* program that came close to
> human-level intelligence in a practical application would take as much
> time
> as that. That is the barrier to demonstrating why an ontology will be
> worthwhile using in a practical application, as contrasted with
> traditional
> IT approaches.
>
> So, if anyone is wondering why I don't just take Cyc and use it for a
> demo -
> aside from the fact that it is still mostly proprietary, the answer is,
> I
> feel certain that it is impossible for anyone person to create a demo
> that
> is sufficiently more impressive than traditional IT methods so as to
> break
> through the consciousness of managers who could fund real projects.
>
> We need a large community to create such a demo, and that is the main
> function of the FO project, regardless of what ontology is eventually
> adopted for that purpose. It just has to be an ontology accepted in
> common
> and used to develop open-source applications that use each other's
> information. The FO proposal is structured to create that community by
> paying developers to join and contribute to it.
>
> And, Oh, while we have been debating this topic for the past month, the
> country has blown at least 10 billion dollars in loss of efficiency due
> to
> lack of semantic interoperability. If the cost/benefit estimates I
> have
> suggested do not seems realistic, then will someone else provide a
> different
> one? Even PatH's pessimistic 0.01% still results in a highly favorable
> benefit/cost ratio. And no one has suggested an alternative except
> "well,
> maybe the semantic web will eventually result in some level of
> interoperability". Tick, tick, there goes another hundred billion with
> no
> progress in that direction.
>
> Pat
>
> Patrick Cassidy
> MICRA, Inc.
> 908-561-3416
> cell: 908-565-4053
> cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
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>
>
> sophistication will be almost
> indistinguishable from the managerial view from ordinary RDB's or
> ordinary
> applications, and there are a lot more people who know how to do RDB's
> and
> traditional programming. Inertia is immense. Getting someone to put
> up
> money to prove that the ontology will help their applications is very
> hard.
> There are some projects, but they are confidential and cannot be talked
> about.
>
> As an example, consider language understanding. A good language
> understanding program that could read a text and answer questions, and
> also
> hold a coherent conversation, even (as JS points out) at a five-year
> old
> level might be impressive enough. But what would it take to create
> such a
> program? One architecture I favor is to have an NLU program highly
> modularized, so that individual modules can be improved and replaced to
> evolve a more powerful system, with an unlimited number of people
> working on
> the system, if it is open-source. But language understanding is
> complex,
> and I believe that the complexity will be at a minimum that which would
> be
> associated with a "lexical-syntactic expert" approach, in which many,
> perhaps most individual words will have to be interpreted by "expert"
> modules designed specifically for individual words, phrases,
> grammatical
> constructions, and contexts. Reasonable fluency at a minimal level
> will
> require a good un
>
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