David (01)
I agree with that ontology must be hidden from users, and so user friendly
labels are important; but these days we are in a more complex world than
that and ontology can be a valuable tool for managing the UI naming process
itself. For example, in the system design I am working on at this moment,
which is for an enterprise with offices in many different countries, I am
modelling a "theme" category which has a controlled vocab of several hundred
ontology terms, each of which may or may not apply in a specific territory,
and each of which has "display labels" in different languages so that the
appropriate name can be presented to the user according to their context, if
the term is valid for them to use (the theme of "pain", for example, being
somewhat different in English than in French). Those constraints are
managed in the ontology (in this case expressed in RDF). It is becoming
commonplace in systems now that any element may require multiple names of
different types and languages with new ones added regularly (and those names
may also be comprised of parts which can be assembled in different orders)
and far from being a barrier, ontology is an excellent and flexible tool to
enable this - as long as it remains hidden from the user. (02)
Godfrey (03)
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Eddy" <deddy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2010 1:00 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Practical onomastics... (04)
Jack - (05)
On May 21, 2010, at 4:58 AM, Jack Park wrote: (06)
> I say that as one
> who gets confused by those who think I'm the Jack Park who writes
> books about baseball.
>
> Jack
> who writes books about wind energy, and XML topic map, not baseball. (07)
IF this ontological effort is going to be successful, at least two
conditions MUST be met at minimum... (08)
(1) the ontological complexity MUST be hidden from 99.99999% of the
end users. If it takes me more than maybe a half dozen keystrokes to
find the label/name/thingy I need, I'm going to scream to turn the
stupid ontology thing OFF!!!! because it's getting in the way. (09)
(precisely like a car... I have a 19 year-old new driver & who has
confessed that he has no idea what a spark plug is... & he plans to
be a mechanical engineer) (010)
If one must be an ontologist to use ontologies, the effort will never
get to the stadium parking lot, much less the starting blocks. (011)
(2) "things" (test tubes, columns in data bases, etc.) MUST have
"good names" (fit for purpose) (012)
(Real world examples: M0101 is not so good for a name these days,
although it was serviceable 40 years ago when Fortran was a dominant
software language, MSTR-POL-NO is a much better name for the
insurance concept "policy number" in a COBOL program. "Policy
number" is an excellent name on a report or in a letter to a
customer, but totally inadequate in a Fortran or COBOL or Java
software program. Try putting "Policy_Number" on a report to a
business person or customer... good luck.) (013)
"Good names" does not mean a requirement for unique names... think
the 3 Cs... (1) context, (2) container, & (3) contents. Context:
baseball vs wind energy (someone looking for baseball will instantly
know he's in the wrong place if wind energy is what he finds),
container, your name (certainly not a unique string), & contents is
the topical information of baseball vs wind energy. (014)
In the physical world we're accustomed to having the 3 Cs fly in
formation... grocery store, milk jug, milk. Multiple parties (dairy
farmer, milk processor, food inspector, store, etc.) are motivated to
have these elements work together. In computers, of course, we're
nowhere close to such congruence. I can easily put my birthdate
into a field labeled Work Phone Number & the ontologically challenged
database will be totally happy. (015)
If business people, business analysts, programmers, clerks, etc. are
forced to learn anything about ontologies in order to use same, then
ontologies will be an utter failure since no one will use them other
than ontologists. (Again back to the example of the car... one needs
to know absolutely nothing about the workings of a car to use it... a
smidge of physics perhaps, but no more than a smidge.) (016)
"Good names" are the labels—good, bad & ugly—that people are
accustomed to working with. Under the covers it's ok to have some
unique (within the domain) identifier that reads like gibberish (e.g.
123-45-6789... but it's highly unlikely that end users will accept
such junk as useful labels. Example: from the world of mainframes...
there is an important IBM software product called CICS that we all
depend on... that is pronounced KICKS by the British (who maintain
the product now) and C-I-C-S by Americans. Call it synonyms or
whatever, it is not possible to tell Americans it's KICKS or Brits
that its CICS. (017)
___________________
David Eddy
deddy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (018)
781-455-0949 (019)
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