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Re: [ontolog-forum] Just What Is an Ontology, Anyway?

To: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "AzamatAbdoullaev" <abdoul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:45:44 +0200
Message-id: <BDF6C30452554BE6AAD96D1653AE90E3@personalpc>
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 7:23 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Just What Is an Ontology, Anyway?

>What George E.P. Box said about models (?All models are wrong, but some are useful.?) is true for ontologies as well.

>AA: Wrong. This is the whole point of ontology to create true models of the world, formal and informal, analytic and desciptive.

 Andreas is right, Azamat. 

AA: Now you are both wrong :-).

An ontology is a model and inherits all the limitations of any other model of the world.

There are models and models. Take a fashion model, of local scale and global range. The same goes for real ontology, a global model of things, physical and digital.

  Models are at best incomplete representation of the world. 

AA:  Models are at worst incomplete representation of the world.  At best they are complete and consistent with the facts, reality and the world. This is what is defined as true. 

There is no such thing as a single ?true? representation of any aspect of the world. 

AA: wonder if anybody called for this thorny issue now. 

 In fact, I think ?true? is a red herring;

AA: Don't see any point here if "red herring" is any diversion from the main issue.

 

 the most desirable (if not only) objective for a model is fidelity and accuracy with respect to purpose.

AA: This is all kinds of truth, to remind the meaning of "accurate", it is what "conforming exactly to truth or a standard".

Azamat

 

Bill

 

 

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of AzamatAbdoullaev
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 10:40 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Cc: vasile.mazilescu@xxxxxxx; semantic-web@xxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Just What Is an Ontology, Anyway?

 

Responding to the seemingly eternal question: what is ontology? I suggest a simple answer, the World Desciption Framework, WDF, giving basic meanings to information, and incorporating all the generic and specific schemas and models and theories,like RDF, E-R Model, upper ontologies, CL, common metadata models, OO models, UML, etc.

What also concerns: we hotly discuss the same issues on <what ontology and semantic web might be> for a rather long time trying to set the frontier of the research, while the "periphery" is coming up with really innovative ideas (see the attached PDF Doc on the Intelligent Knowledge Management and Universal Knowledge Technology from Romania).

Azamat Abdoullaev

PS: If we are aimed at semantic interoperability, it would be good to try the concept from the exchange of information between the two closed fora, SW and Ontolog. 

----- Original Message -----

Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 8:53 PM

Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Just What Is an Ontology, Anyway?

 

This viewpoint is not completely new to everyone. In particular in the modeling & simulation community, the idea that each model represents ? very similar to an ontology ? a viewpoint needed to address a given challenge (the model was build to help solving a problem, and the viewpoint needed to solve the problem becomes the viewpoint of the model) becomes predominant. Each model is a purposeful abstraction and simplification of reality, again similar to an ontology.

AA: Right.

What George E.P. Box said about models (?All models are wrong, but some are useful.?) is true for ontologies as well.

AA: Wrong. This is the whole point of ontology to create true models of the world, formal and informal, analytic and desciptive.

 

iIn other words: each ontology contributes a different facet to a description, and in order to get the whole picture, all facets are needed.

The only common ontology description integrating everything is the world

AA: Here is the confusion of the universe of discourse and the discourse itself. See on the WDF above.

(if we exclude imagination of what could be to make the problem a little bit easier), but we could not use the world to answer our problem in the first place, that is why we developed a simpler model for our use.

Long story short: we do not need a common ontology,

AA: that's a strategic mistake.

but we need a common way to describe our work allowing the mediation of viewpoints. As our worldviews differ in scope (what we look at), resolution (detail we are looking at), and structure (categorization of what we are looking at), these mediations will not always be loss-free, but that is part of the nature of the beast.

It seems like we are starting to come to very similar observations and reach mappable conclusions in different scientific domains.

 

Andreas

 

 

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Burkett, William [USA]
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 2:30 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Just What Is an Ontology, Anyway?

 

Bravo, Rich ? this is the first time I?ve heard anyone in any of these ontology/SUO forums stress so strongly the human-factor aspect of data semantics.   I?ve been trying to argue this point for years but to most CS-trained individuals it just falls on deaf ears.   I even have a nice little catchy name for the theory:  ?Data Is Speech?.    As you suggest, there will be multiple ontologies (or whatever you want to call them) to formally represent different views of the word and they will need to be quickly adaptable to changing business requirements .  And the one significant missing and way way underserved ingredient is mapping and translation technology. 

 

Bill



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