Patrick Cassidy wrote:
> I agree with the points that Ed B has distilled from Amanda's post, and
> with most of the rest of Ed's and Amanda's remarks, but with one big caveat:
>
>
>> - We need to spend our time building real ontologies that solve real
>> problems
>> - We can use upper ontology concept sets where they help in
>> supporting
>> and elucidating the models we make. (We tend to re-create these
>> concept
>> sets on our own when we need them; better is to reuse them.)
>> - We need to have good means of access to the concept sets in
>> proposed
>> upper ontologies, so that we can reuse them.
>> - In this way we can learn what upper ontologies and concept sets are
>> most useful, and perhaps to what purposes, and upper ontologies that
>> are useful will "emerge".
>>
>
> The caveat is, that the process of waiting patiently while ontology
> applications develop and haltingly find themselves wanting to interoperate
> with others, and little by little finding commonalities that they can share,
> is at best slow and I suspect will take generations to arrive at anything
> like a usable common standard of meaning that is useful for widespread
> accurate interoperability. The pace thus far suggest to me that no one
> participating in this list will live to see any widespread adoption of broad
> cross-domain interoperability by this method. That would be fine if there
> were no costs to waiting, but there are large costs. We not only lose the
> economic efficiency derivable from data interoperability, we lose the
> potential new and more powerful applications that could be developed more
> rapidly by communities that can learn from each other's results because they
> use a common standard of meaning.
>
> Rather than just settle in for a 40-year academic career watching people
> try to connect on their own, a more pro-active method makes more sense to
> me. The essence of the suggestion I have made for a 100-participant
> Foundation Ontology effort includes the notions that Amanda and Ed have
> made: we need to build and demonstrate real ontologies that solve real
> problems, and make these available to the world to learn from. But for the
> purpose of demonstrating the potential of an ontology to support
> cross-domain interoperability, it will be necessary to have applications in
> several domains demonstrate that they can interoperate using a common
> ontology. For that, funding for a project of adequate size to build several
> ontology-driven applications and the common ontology to integrate them is
> needed. The result will be one example of how interoperability for
> real-world purposes can be achieved. It may evolve to become very widely
> used, or it may be superseded by something better. But until we have one
> such common ontology and supported applications available for public
> inspection and testing, we will be confined to merely speculating about what
> might or might not work. And however based in her own experience, Amanda's
> projections about what might happen in the future are still speculations (as
> are my own). We need real experimental testing of hypotheses.
>
> That level of funding is common in many fields, and project CALO was
> plenty large enough to support a study of this kind. Project CALO,
> unfortunately, did not try to build an ontology by a large consortium, but
> only by a single group. However technically capable that ontology was (and
> the parts I have seen look OK, but with sparse documentation), it still will
> have great difficulty finding acceptance among other potential users (does
> anyone on this list use Porter's KM or CLIB?), even if the application
> supported by it were publicly available. The application is not as yet
> publicly available. This strikes me as an unfortunate lost opportunity.
> But the benefits of a common Foundation Ontology are large enough to justify
> many projects in the $30M price range to develop a widely usable foundation
> ontology, until we get one that succeeds.
>
> Pat
>
> Patrick Cassidy
> MICRA, Inc.
> 908-561-3416
> cell: 908-565-4053
> cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
>
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>
As I have suggested before, why not use the wiki to start to build the
case for this project.
The arguments for it and against it seem relatively stable..
The next step, in my opinion would be to start to build a scope section
that would identify which areas would be addressed in an initial project.
After that, the task outline and the manpower allocation could be
outlined. What do the 100 people do and how do you organize it so that
the project can be managed? What are the interim deliverables and
milestone dates?
$30,000,000 for 100 people is $300,000 per person, so the project runs
for a few years. (01)
What is the mix of skill sets required? Infrastructure costs - people,
material, travel, conference attendance, etc. (02)
If the EU put up half and the US put up half, you are now getting down
into budget amounts that already have been funded for other projects. (03)
Ron (04)
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