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But then how do we account for
the diverse viewpoints going into the system from multiple users? We all agree
that each user has a unique ontology of her personal world. We know that
subjectivity gets squeezed into the tightest databases with the strictest
controls.
MW:
You can’t. And in fact the problem really is just how do you impose
sufficiently strict controls such that the range of meaning is sufficiently
small that sufficiently accurate communication is possible.
“Imposing controls”
is the wrong approach. It might work for extremely simple jobs like a standard
cashier quest check. But even there, imagine yourself at a table in a restaurant;
you want your burger done protein style, hold the relish, wrapped in lettuce,
without mayonnaise, with an extra salt packet. Can the store’s IT
designer predict what you, the customer, will order? Some of those “strict
controls” drive away customers. They also stifle change and
adaptability.
You must. As John Sowa is fond of
saying, people play language games.
MW: But computers
don’t.
Those games are more complicated than we
can decipher from signs alone. So one enterprise level purpose of each
subjective personal ontology is to “correct” the personal
viewpoint, projecting it back into the enterprise ontology.
MW: This is
essentially the process of agreeing the enterprise ontology, or aligning with
it.
But not at the focus of
the employee; each employee has her own ontology. Only part of her
ontology aligns with the enterprise ontology. If you have ever managed a
staff of people, you understand how diverse and inherently unmanageable people
are. It takes work spent learning new skills by you as the manager to get
people to do what the enterprise requires. And those skills require you
to understand each employee’s needs if you plan to work with her for more
than one transaction. Every job is negotiated, not rigidly specified, for
most forms of work. There are few assembly line processes with people
pegged into slots any more. The person with her own viewpoint is what you
want to empower, enable, leverage, and automate. The enterprise has to gain
during that process with each transaction, at least on the average.
So in my opinion, the
focus of the employee ontology ought to be personal, with projections onto
organizational or group ontologies that enable work flow.
But note that if you project the
disjunction of all personal ontologies to make up the enterprise ontology, you
have to match common items shared among personal ontologies.
MW: I don’t
know anyone who would do it like that. Much more likely is that a few people
determine the enterprise ontology, and then others are left with aligning their
own viewpoint with it.
I certainly wouldn’t
do it like that either; I am using it above as a conceptual aid to get the idea
across about how the enterprise ontology and the employee ontology ought to be
related. And the “few people” you mentioned should include
all employees interacting with the network, IMHO. But employees who have
to “align their own viewpoint” by themselves are probably not functioning
at full performance levels.
For example, probably most or all normal
English speakers think of fluids in one way, solids in another and gases in a
third. The English language reflects the way we talk about the things
belonging to these different classes.
MW: One has to be
very careful about this. Language includes lots of old ways of thinking about
things that are not accurate. Ontology is about modeling how things are in the
world, not how we talk about them.
I disagree because “how
we talk about things” is the process of communication that the enterprise
ontology is supposed to leverage in the first place, at least in my grand vision
of things. Rigid and fixed enterprise ontology will not do the job. Language
is very flexible precisely because we have evolved commonly understood ways of
twisting and reforming language to fit our newest needs.
By force fitting “the”
ontology onto the user, we perpetuate the errors of old technologies. Technology
has gotten so cheap, so plentiful and so prevalent that we can afford to tailor
our systems to the individuals now. The point is to leverage people, and
the enterprise gains from the rising tide of productivity.
So there is clearly a linguistic common
ontology of objects and classes that constitutes everyday usage.
MW: No there is not,
because with everyday language you can express any of the ontologies you might
find. Words have such a variety of usages, that it can be difficult to
accurately determine the meaning of words out o f context, and sometimes even
in context.
I cordially disagree
because the emphasis should be placed on EVERYDAY OBJECTS, EVENTS and ACTIONS. For
example, the enterprise ontology should understand simple English rule descriptions
written in everyday documents in common language. It should also be able
to maintain a database of common events, objects, resources and people in the
enterprise. It should know about the properties of commonly shared
objects (meeting rooms, refrigerators, projectors, lunch options …). If
the firm is a law firm, it might understand customer accounts and simple
descriptions of the work done there. If the enterprise is a furniture factory,
it might understand framing, springs, fabric inventory, pattern design, cutting,
piecework, stitching techniques and so on.
That can be part of the enterprise
ontology. But its part of EVERY language competent ontology.
MW: I’ve no
idea what that might be. As I said above, ontology is about the things in the
world, not how we talk about them.
We disagree primarily on
that point. Ontology, IMHO, is exactly how we talk about and use the
objects, events and actions of our everyday surroundings. Its purpose is
to provide scaffolding for building semantic knowledge into our everyday lives.
So the enterprise ontology also includes
things specific to the objects about which that enterprise is concerned.
Leading to the conclusion that the
enterprise ontology will have to be multilayered, scalloped like a 50’s
hot rod into component ontologies for each viewpoint and each group of
viewpoints.
MW: Well yes you can
do that (maybe), but at prohibitive expense because of the interfaces between
vewpoints, so I doubt if anyone will. This is back to why a meeting of a
French, Italian, German and Spanish people will conduct business in English.
With the environment here
in the US,
we have mainly the King’s English, with relatively little non English
material in most of our lives. We have already agreed on the human language.
So the problem here now is to make our systems understand it so we can get them
to be more useful! The task is to automate the six year old.
-Rich
Regards
Matthew
West
Information
Junction
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So it looks like the consensus among those in this discussion is:
An ontology is a collection
of
classes, each with possibly
unique property values;
a few constant
instances (e.g., equilateral triangle = special instance of generalized
triangle, etc);
I’m
not sure that I would see equilateral triangle as an instance. Surely there is
more than one of them? On the other hand it could be a subtype of generalized
triangle (some triangles are equilateral).
On
the other hand there are plenty of individuals I might want in my ontology. If
I want to define a class of “Ford Motor Car” in my ontology
then it is useful to be able to have the individual “Ford Motor
Company” in my ontology so that I can make the restriction class.
and
logical relationships among
the classes and instances.
And nothing else. If that satisfies everyone, then any
operational system would require more than just an ontology. It would
also require that information nobody seems to want to call ontological, like
the specific employees in the employee table.
If we accept this definition among the group of us, an ontology with a
database to back it would be about the simplest semantic system I can imagine
being useful. The database would store the instance data beyond the
ontology, but the ontology would define the classes, properties and
relationships among the entities.
MW: It will probably
replicate much of the ontology too. It might be better to think of the ontology
as an abstraction of the database, with some rules added, so that you can e.g.
check the consistency of the database.
But then how do we account for the diverse viewpoints going into the
system from multiple users? We all agree that each user has a unique
ontology of her personal world. We know that subjectivity gets squeezed
into the tightest databases with the strictest controls.
MW: You
can’t. And in fact the problem really is just how do you impose
sufficiently strict controls such that the range of meaning is sufficiently
small that sufficiently accurate communication is possible.
So how do we account for personal ontologies in a semantic system?
MW: The alternative
is to document all the individual ontologies and map between them. This is
horrendously expensive, so a much cheaper alternative is to sit down and agree
to use one in a particular way, which may not be the way that any of the
individuals actually sees things, but at least is clear. This is at least
analogous to the situation you find when an Italian, and Frenchman, a German
and a Spaniard have a business meeting. They speak English, rather than each
have 3 translators.
So I suggest we
return to the real world.