John, (01)
That sounds eminently doable, and I would certainly want to be involved
with such a thing. Maybe this could be aligned with the Open Ontology
Repository work in some way? (02)
The stuff I put together for the EDM Council Semantics Repository may be
a useful picture of part of the problem space - see
www.hypercube.co.uk/edmcouncil under "Global Terms". This is a rough and
ready starting point for the simple terms I wanted to derive
industry-specific terms from. My intention is to adapt this over time to
better use existing standards semantics and identify those more formally
than I have so far. At present I have simply cloned terms from a couple
of suitable ontologies, but I intend to replace this with models of
"owlImports" relations to the relevant ontologies. For instance in the
"Time" section I have replicated terms from the W3C Time Ontology but
these should really be in a separate UML package stereotyped as an OWL
Ontology, with the imports relationship. Similarly in the geographical
section, I later came across the UN FAO ontology and since they are the
people that a country writes to when it changes its name, this could be
said to be the ultimate authority on those terms, though it doe snot
cover intra-country terms. However this illustrates an interesting
problem, which is that (according to a reply to a question at last
year's SemTech conference) they did not anticipate others using their
ontology. Some of the concepts are in my view too close to a "design"
and less amenable to being referred to. So maybe there is scope for some
"push-back" to such bodies to help with the integrity of their own
ontologies, I wonder. (03)
Much of my rough and ready upper ontology work could also do with a
revisit by more expert ontologists, and some improvement in the use of
more fundamental relationships and the like. You will also spot some
blissful ignorance and/or engineering approximation to the interesting
time issues that Pat H described recently, in how I got from the W3C
primitives to the sort of time and date terms that are defined in the
FpML derivatives XML standard and other financial industry requirements
for times and dates. For example "a day which if it's a non working day
would roll forward to the next working day, unless it's the end of the
month in which case it rolls back" is still a day. (04)
Ultimately I would want to see the EDM Council work situated within the
framework of a more rigorous set of common, shared ontology terms
especially the more primitive relationship types. I would really want to
have that in place within the next 4 or 5 years so that when the
financial industry messaging standards (principally ISO 20022) are
upgraded to include an ontology-based semantics layer, our semantics
would become that layer, while being properly situated in relation to
other industry standards both within and outside the industry. At the
moment we are more focused on completing the industry-specific material
but this is something I would dearly like to come back to. (05)
So count me in! (06)
Mike (07)
John F. Sowa wrote:
> Mike,
>
> I agree:
>
> MB> I think it would make sense to set up a structure as you describe
> > and populate it with such terms as can be defined semantically from
> > authoritative industry sources i.e. industry standards, along with
> > annotation of the provenance of those semantics.
>
> The goal would be to "populate" it with any and all resources that
> anyone might make available under a suitable license. SourceForge,
> Wikipedia, and WordNet are three different examples of rich resources
> that were developed with modest levels of funding. The W3C and ISO
> are examples that require more funding, but have a more disciplined
> organization. There are many other organizations and consortiums
> that use various non-profit business models for maintaining resources,
> free, low cost, or high cost.
>
> Instead of $30 million for a 3-year project, I would suggest a more
> modest amount of funding to organize a long-term non-profit organization
> that could accept contributions (of ontologies and funding), vet the
> ontologies and related resources, organize them, and maintain them
> according to guidelines along the lines we have been discussing.
>
> MB> A vital component of this would be change management, such that
> > when the competent authority makes a change or an addition to
> > their semantics, this can be picked up and propagated through the
> > resource and any developments that have made use of this resource.
> > A tall order perhaps, but not as tall as maintaining an isolated
> > huge ontology.
>
> I agree. But we don't have to make it perfect on the first try.
> Getting the resources together would be an important first step.
>
> MB> For the most part such terms would also be more relevant to how
> > information is passed between computers, than something from the
> > broader and fuzzier world of the human language dictionary, I would
> > venture to suggest. They would certainly be simpler.
>
> The organization could include both formal ontologies and lexical
> resources for mapping the formally defined theories to natural
> languages. But it's important to distinguish the two. WordNet
> is often called an ontology, but it's closer to a dictionary
> than to a formal ontology. It's important to clarify the nature
> of the various resources and their interrelationships.
>
> MB> I think a relevant point is that any "widely supported ontology"
> > should be widely supported because it has emerged from industry
> > specialists doing real work (like [Matthew's] work at Shell) and
> > not because some group of clever ontologists have got some funding
> > and gone off and done some ontology and then worked to get it widely
> > supported. In other words, the semantics would be widely supported
> > to begin with.
>
> My preference is to let the users "vote with their feet". All the
> contributed ontologies would be organized in a hierarchy. Each one
> would have statistics, documentation, and reviews about how it was
> being used and the results obtained. Nothing would have to be thrown
> away, all versions of all resources would always be available, and
> users could view the collection according to various criteria:
> popularity, reviews, success stories, application domain, etc.
>
> John
>
>
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> (08)
--
Mike Bennett
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