Ed (01)
I agree with you. (02)
Let me paraphrase these ideas in my own words
(plus some words borrowed from other people). (03)
The picture that is emerging in my brain is the following.
The ontology of ontologies
[Sowa's lattice of theories]
[Cyc's lattice of genlMt and specMt relations]
is much more complex than any single ontology of concepts.
The desired upper ontology can be identified from this
ontology of ontologies. (04)
We will advance the state of the art more quickly by
building useful single ontologies for particular applications,
instead of searching for an upper ontology which is suitable
for all applications. (05)
Dick McCullough
http://mkrmke.org
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ed Barkmeyer" <edbark@xxxxxxxx>
To: "Patrick Cassidy" <pat@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: "'[ontolog-forum] '" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 9:32 AM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] ISO merged ontology effort "MCO" (06)
> Patrick Cassidy wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Well, at the rate of 1 "generation" per 5 years in the IT community, the
> fact that it might indeed require 2-3 generations does not strike me as
> daunting. Further, if knowledge engineering of the ontology kind
> actually becomes a major part of software engineering, instead of an
> academic exercise in tool building and a government experiment in
> technologies for classified applications, the experience curve will be a
> lot steeper.
>
> It is my impression that the existing upper ontology work has
> demonstrated all of the following:
> - that there are certain essentially mathematical concepts that can be
> codified and shared by many practical ontologies
> - that beyond that one can create several levels of upper categories
> that solve no problem of themselves and are directly useful only to the
> development of possibly useful mid-level ontologies that still solve no
> problem of themselves.
> - that the upper level categorization requires ontological commitments
> that are largely irrelevant to the real problem spaces but create
> serious impediments to the merger of mid-level ontologies.
>
> John Sowa will doubtless tell us that Cyc -- the mysterious and powerful
> Oz -- has seen all of this and conquered it (if only they could tell
> us). (And if true, it would not be the first time that a military
> technology had to be rediscovered/reinvented by others in order to
> become a useful technology.)
>
> What Amanda proposes is that we get some real experience using
> ontologies in more than the biomedical and intelligence communities
> before we leap to the conclusion that some particular Gedanken
> experiment will be useful in solving arbitrary unknown problems.
> And that experience is actively being acquired as we write -- the first
> "generation" began several years ago.
>
>> 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.
>
> Well, Pat, think of it this way. The effort to create a universal
> reference upper ontology with that kind of mandate will be about power,
> not quality. It will be primarily governed by money and politics, not
> technical excellence, and not knowledge engineering in the field. And
> my 40+ years of experience warns me the result could be the Windows of
> upper ontologies, and 10 years later we will have patched it into an
> upper ontology that can just barely support most industrial
> applications. So, if you want to risk repeating the 1990s, all ahead
> full and damn the torpedos.
>
> I, for one, would prefer to see the next 5+ years spent on in vivo
> testing of knowledge engineering concepts, and on the development of a
> discipline. Think of it as the medical experience that will give us
> some knowledge of the required properties of your panacea.
>
> -Ed
>
> --
> 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
>
> "The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
> and have not been reviewed by any Government authority."
>
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> (07)
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