Generalizations such as those below are entirely unproductive in
any discussion attempting to communicate objective knowledge. If there are any
criticisms of particular projects, they should be specified in detail. Please
don’t waste our time with unverifiable indictments of unnamed individuals, or
worse, entire communities.
Pat
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of FERENC KOVACS
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 5:05 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Past, Present, and Future of Ontology
My pleasure. It is enjoyable to read your comments.Now the
next question pops us, why have ontologies at all? Ontologists have no idea of
the domains, they are intruders in any specifics. They do not either have a
clue what translation or semantic analyis of Natural Languages is about, and those busy
in producing MT software and TMs are also incompetent as translators. What they
do is to produce rubbish to be corrected by professional translators who are
well educated in the relevant domains in both languages, if they are abut at
all. Localisation and MT software are a clear means of exploiting translator
talents and they are a curse not a blessing for the free lancers. What you have
here is surplus money finding another niche to fleece intellectual property.
Translation memories are a simple theft and the colonialisation of the
knowledge created by slaves through translating.
Not very long ago I found a US society busy in the
augmenting or accelerating intellect/intelligence. Their image of the future of
the US was openly a cast system with different classes of people with different
access rights to digitally coded knowledge. When I blew the whistle by
sending the link around, they deleted the website, but their friends and
associates are still about. So if I were Dick, I would not press my ideas for
recognition by such a lot, even though he may be right in many respect in his
idealis strives. The current method of discussion on this forum makes not
much sense either, especially, because you would expect more compassion
from people trained in logic or the disciplined mind. But instead of
clarifying and defining each term, one by one and proceed step by step, you
(THE FORUM) have a habit of firing at each other by citing and giving
references on literature. This will take you nowhere just as editing Wikipedia,
where you cannot have a word without giving your sources: Metrics and
falsification dislodge common sense and listening skills. Science is being
abandoned worldwide for the irrational, the emotional, the alternative
and the underground. All because you have a Harvard produced elite and a
tight academic world of the old boys network who bribe politicians for
financial support in the name of progress and sustainability.
This worl is trying to make us outsiders believe that the
western culture based on the perfection of precision targeting in
nano and cosmo levels as part of its collision culture will never pass out, but
grow all the time (like a balloon, of course, just as the derivatives). And
indeed, a united or integrated ontology under circumstancs when two
academics or scholars cannot even on what the words meaning or context mean is
a pitiful ambition. What they produce for the translatioin trade is none the
less more meritable.
From: John F. Sowa
<sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: [ontolog-forum] <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, 29 May, 2009 9:24:49 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Past, Present, and Future of Ontology
Frank,
Thank you for the reference. I followed it to the following source:
https://www8.imperial.ac.uk/content/dav/ad/workspaces/business-school/programmes/doctoral/Technology_Transfer_Studentship_QinetiQ.pdf
The author, Erkko Autio, also has other valuable insights in other
articles. But I'd just like to comment on the following quotation
from the passage you cited:
> Because of the historical dominance of market-based theoretical
> frameworks, the dynamics of innovation in value networks are
> poorly understood. To understand technology transfer and diffusion
> in such environments, it is necessary to discard market-based
> theories and replace them with institutional and structural theories.
Autio certainly does *not* downplay the importance of the market, but
he emphasizes that success in any new venture also depends on the
"‘users’, ‘suppliers’, and ‘innovators’" and their roles in the
institutions.
For example, Alta Vista and Yahoo were dominant search engines long
before Google came along. The market was already mature when Google
was just a student project at Stanford. What led to the success of
Google and its continued dominance was the result of many factors,
including the innovations and the talents of the entrepreneurs.
Without a market, nobody gets any rewards. But being the first to
market doesn't ensure long-term success.
If we apply these insights to ontology, there are some hypotheses
that seem likely:
1. There are some applications for ontology, but there is no evidence
of a market for ontologies, as such. Cyc was in existence
for 25
years, and they were trying to sell ontologies for almost all
that
time with very little success. Cycorp is now making some
money
by building applications that use ontologies rather than the
ontologies themselves.
2. WordNet is widely used because it is free. But most of the
applications are research projects, not applications that make
a significant amount of money directly from WordNet itself.
3. OntologyWorks is a small company that builds applications
that use ontologies, primarily by aligning relational databases.
They started with their own upper level ontology based on Dolce,
but they found that the upper level wasn't very useful for
aligning independent databases. They found that the most
useful ontologies were the more specialized lower levels.
4. The Japanese EDR project (Electronic Dictionary Research) began
around the same time as Cyc and WordNet. They developed an
ontology of about 400,000 concepts with mappings to both English
and Japanese. Multibillions of yen were spent on that
project,
but there were very few users. They charged $20,000 per
copy
for commercial users, but universities could get a much cheaper
copy. Stanford has a copy of EDR, but the last I heard,
nobody
at Stanford ever used it for anything, not even for a research
project.
5. At VivoMind, we have developed our own ontology based on freely
available resources, and we have developed tools for extracting
additional information from text and tailoring it for various
applications. If a large free ontology were available, we
would
probably find some use for it, but we're doing quite well without
it. As Cyc and OntologyWorks have discovered, the reasoning
is
done at the lower levels. Lexical resources such as
WordNet,
VerbNet, and Roget's Thesaurus together with special lexicons
for application domains are suitable for broad coverage.
For reasons like these, I believe that developing a large expensive
ontology with the coverage of Cyc or EDR would be a waste of time,
money, and highly expensive talent.
A much cheaper and more useful approach would be to develop a
lattice or hierarchy on top of some suitable repository. Then
populate that hierarchy with all the ontologies (big and small)
that anyone might contribute. The hierarchy would provide the
framework for relating all the ontologies that anyone might ever
develop and contribute.
This approach would not preclude the eventual development of a
large upper level, but it could get started today with a minimum
of funding -- not much more than a web site and a good programmer.
That programmer could even be a part-time volunteer.
John Sowa
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