Hi Ed,
I would add the following to your excellent characterization.
In human affairs, it is occasionally necessary and useful to eliminate
fuzziness, opacity and ambiguity in expressions. If I engage in a contract
with another person, the contract needs to have the same meaning to both of
us. Otherwise, bad things happen. Consequently, legal contracts have a
special interpretation, and any other "normal" interpretations are
inapplicable.
Situations crop up routinely in business where it is in the best interests
of all parties to an arrangement that they all have the same interpretation
of the arrangement. Consequently, an unambiguous interpretation of the
prose, or alternatively, a "formal" specification that is by its
construction transparent and unambiguous, is helpful. This need has resulted
in regulatory organizations, such as the Financial Accounting Standards
Board, whose responsibility it is to provide definitions of terms and
phrases and to define rules of practice so that one can rely on the numbers,
words and structures one sees on financial statements.
Airline pilots have a specific language of communication with controllers.
The purpose of this language is to insure that misunderstandings that could
have severe consequences do not happen often. About 15 years ago, these
rules were violated by an airline pilot arriving at NYC low on fuel. The
craft ran out of fuel and crashed into Long Island Sound with considerable
loss of life.
My point is that ontologies (which are essentially the basis for a
transparent and unambiguous form of communication) are not just for
software. But, you knew that already.
Thanks, Jim (01)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Edward
Barkmeyer
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 1:32 PM
To: Burkett, William [USA]
Cc: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontologies as social mediators (02)
Bill, (03)
I think we agree, but we are talking about two different topics. (04)
I wrote:
>> It means exactly what it says and only what it says.
>> (05)
Bill wrote:
> Does not make sense without considering (at least a limited) social
setting. The ontology means absolutely nothing if there is no human (or
his/her software surrogate) to interpret it. "Meaning" is a human
phenomenon - isn't it?
> (06)
This is entirely correct. But, as I said, the intended audience for an
ontology -- a software artifact that represents knowledge in a formal
logic language -- is not primarily human. A human can read the ontology
and assign all kinds of loads to the terms, but the reason why a human
reads the ontology is only to determine whether it is suitable for use
by his software in performing his target application. A reasoning
engine, or another software tool, will only work with the formally
specified elements according to the formal meaning of the formal
language. The notion "meaning" for the software tooling is what
inferences it can make, what derived forms it can produce, what
decisions it will affect. And those will not be based on what the human
thinks the ontology terms "mean". (07)
The human is judging whether the ontology is "practically consistent"
with his intent. And he may be wrong in his initial judgement. He may
get specific inferences he didn't expect. But that is exactly the same
learning process that two humans go through in establishing effective
communication. They think they have agreement on the concepts, terms
and rules, until some outlier case demonstrates that they don't have
quite the same concepts. (08)
The idea here is that what the software will do with the ontology
concepts should be predictable (within the limits of competencies and
implementation errors), but what humans will do with any exchange is not
predictable, because we cannot really know exactly what meaning they
took from the exchange. What makes the human interactions work is
tolerance and fuzziness, but what makes the software work is the rigidity. (09)
We do not yet know how to make software that reads natural language text
and behaves as predictably and as usefully as software that interprets
formal ontologies. (010)
If your objective is to improve communication between humans, it is not
clear that an ontology is better than a text corpus. That said, the
strictures of a formal language force a discipline on the author of the
ontology that may improve the communication over what that person would
have written in natural language. And in fact, as some previous
discussion on this exploder revealed, a lot of knowledge engineers have
discovered that introducing formalism and graphical presentation of
concepts often significantly improves the ability of a group of domain
experts to achieve a reliable common terminology and understanding. It
gets them past the sloppy text that passes for communication of concepts
in their communities and the related presumption that unspecified
properties and constraints are part of the shared understanding. (011)
You and I are probably in violent agreement. (012)
My long-standing point is that knowledge engineering is an engineering
discipline; it is not a branch of philosophy or linguistics or cognitive
science, and it is not primarily about communications among humans. It
is about communicating between humans and software. The amazing thing
about AI software is that it doesn't have any idea what domain it
operates on, or what any of its manipulations actually "mean", but it
produces valuable results. But then again, the same is true of Newton's
calculus, and the IBM 704. (013)
(I am reminded of a presentation I heard about 30 years ago from a
person from Shell Oil. He described an elaborate program for evaluating
their software performance in various ways and making improvements in
certain areas to reduce the total computational time. At the end, he
said: "Taken together, this set of improvements (which must have cost
several million dollars) has reduced our total computational load by
12%." And as the audience snickered, he followed that with: "Since the
Shell research center has 9 5M$ computer systems, that saving is one
entire computer system!" The meaning of a result is definitely
context-dependent!) (014)
-Ed (015)
--
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 (016)
"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
and have not been reviewed by any Government authority." (017)
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