Yes, I was making a different point. With this group I thought I could assume that category was general enough to include classes, relationships, including subset relationships and others.
But I would say that an actual model would be made, conformant with the ontology, in the same way that patterns of actual instantiation (like the orders I mentioned) could be made, conformant with the ontology (or not).
I see that your definition of the term ontology includes models. Mine does not. For instance, I have built hundreds of process models for different situations. I don't think of each of these as ontologies, but depending on the method of modeling there is an explicit or implicit ontology of "process" built into different tools and techniques. And, these tools would probably benefit from making their implicit ontologies explicit, incorporated into the tools.
In the instance of constructing a particular process model, some domain-specific information may be used to populate it. This information will conform to a mental ontology within the domain, but in today's world it is unlikely to also be rendered in an ontology capture and manipulation tool/language, but it would be cool if it were.
Here's another quick example and a question. Think of a company that has employees. I think that part of the ontology of that company is that employees exist, they are hired, they have supervisors, they can have budgets, they have benefits according to some plan, etc. I do not think of a list of employees as part of the ontology. For instance, do you think the ontology changes every time an employee is hired or quits?
Bottom line is that I think models, ontologies, and instance-level working applications are different things, but this is clearly a matter of viewpoint, and a good example of polysemy, even for the word "ontology" itself.
Cheers!
Doug
On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 11:05 AM, Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Doug, you have suggested that ontology is
just the set of categories, i.e. classes, with properties and behaviors, with
sets and subset relationships among them, but WITHOUT the entire framework of
an operational model with full structure; not a model capable of simulating the
world.
Sort of like a library of classes that has
been done once and for all. Now that we have this hypothetical ontology
available in the library, the classes thereof can be instantiated to make such
a simulation of the world by further effort. But that is a whole nother
project.
For example, a library of electrical
components can be built and might contain resistors, capacitors, transistors,
sensors, effectors, but no diagram of a Dolby stereo surround sound system. Then
I could build a Dolby stereo surround sound system by instantiating the right
components and building a simulation of the Dolby equations as interpreted in
the library of components. Kinda indirect (easier jus to simulate the
equations without using electrical analogies of the equations) but you get the
analogy I’m trying to make, I hope.
If an ontology is a set of classes, then
it provides a library of functionality.
If an ontology is a set of classes with a
model of a world structured on top of it, then it provides a specific
application of the library, along with that library itself.
Which one is it? I vote for the
library kind of definition for ontology. Anyone have a divergent view to
offer? Surely someone can reasonably justify defining ontology as the
full model including simulation.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
>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. An ontology is a model and inherits all the limitations of any
other model of the world. Models are at
best incomplete representation of the world. There is no such
thing as a single “true” representation of any aspect of the world.
In fact, I think “true” is a red herring; the most desirable (if
not only) objective for a model is fidelity and accuracy with respect to
purpose.
Bill
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).
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
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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