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[ontolog-forum] Re Language v Logic

To: "'[ontolog-forum] '" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Rich Cooper" <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2010 10:24:54 -0700
Message-id: <20100916172503.94259138D13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Hi Pavithra,

 

Thanks for your thoughts on this issue.  I agree that many, perhaps most of the programmers have degrees not directly related to computer science, and often not even to engineering or science in any way.  I have worked with programmers that have history and English degrees as well as fully qualified technical people.  

 

But there is always a computer knowledgeable person doing the system level designs.  They lay out the plans, create the system architecture, and otherwise do the analysis and system designs that the less trained people fill in with details that are reviewed in design reviews and critiqued by the knowledgeable CS trained person in charge.  It doesn’t take a civil engineer to paint your kitchen, even if she can’t figure out how to build your house.  

 

Yet the point I was making in earlier emails has nothing to do with the DEVELOPMENT team, it is a reflection of the USERS.  There are likely no CS trained users (unless the system was designed to support them in the first place).  Yet the data they enter into the columns of the database comes from their world view and from the available information at data entry time.  There is no reason why the USER has to be familiar with technologies other than typing and perceiving the business situation.  

 

-Rich

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

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From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pavithra
Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 7:16 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Language vs Logic

 


Rich,

A lot of times such problems are caused by management issues.   Computer Science is a misplaced name in the industry.  Half the people in Computer Science / Information technology industry do not have  the education or experience in the field.   There is so much of emphasis on communication and lip sinking ( people who read other people' papers and use the words, without having intricate knowledge of the subject and pretend to be  very technical) and people skills,  they over look the actual skill development to do the work. 

Computer Science is the hard hit area in that regards.   Initially it all looks fine, a mixture of skills ( people skills, language skills, business knowldege ,SME etc etc along with math, analytical, computer and engineering and science people)  and versatility etc.  But when you have to have systems that have to  run and perform, that is when you realize the impact of it.   Because a lot of people do not have the basic concepts right, and build on all sorts of things.   It is like a person who puts UML as a skill set, with all the other computer skills without having Computer background and develop a set of CRUD routines for use cases.   Such things defeats the purpose of  analysis of the computer systems.    Some people just learn one programming language and use it for some time and understand the whole Computer Science concept.  At least that is understandable.  But some people do not study nor work as programmers and all of a sudden become other people' resume and start designing or talking of technical concept.    And some people are just bad programmers.

As I said, Computer Science is the hard hit area when it comes to skill sets and concept understanding.   I do agree, that people need to have soft skills and people skills to understand business and subject matter.  But such people  may or may not design good systems.
And people who have the aptitude to design, may not have the required decision making power . 

People think if you have one engineering degree, you can build systems.   If I have Computer Engineering degree, can I build a car?  It is engineering too.   I have to have opportunity to study different aspect of designing a  car to design a car or automobile.  Will an automobile industry person hire a computer engineer to design a car?  ( unless the person has studied Automobile engineering along with computers?  Yes one can use CAD to design a car, yet his concept of automobile engineering has to be clear) )

 I attribute to software failure to many such soft management issues as well..  ..in the industry. 

Regards,
Pavithra





--- On Tue, 9/14/10, Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


From: Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Language vs Logic
To: "'[ontolog-forum] '" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 10:36 PM

Hi Pavithra,

 

I am not discussing structured design, programming or analysis, all of which I violently agree with.  The DB I mentioned that has errors in over 40% of the rows was a MEDICAL database used in actual practice to record patient treatments over a period of years, and I was able to testify in court, while showing documented evidence, about the actual user error rate really being that bad.  The structured design and development techniques which you and I both subscribe to are not related to the effectiveness of the actual user inputs as interpreted in the DB.  

 

Yourdon, Coad and McCabe don’t get involved in that end of the work, at least not to my knowledge.  I have heard both Yourdan and McCabe’s lectures, which are very useful, but which don’t address that particular issue in database implementations.  I also am unaware of any statements any of them might have made about ontologies and singularity/polysemy of column semantics.  I simply find that claim of singularity naïve in view of what actually happens in databases in commercial and military practice.  

 

In another case, a 911 emergency response system, the desk time required to enter a new caller (one who has never phoned that 911 service before) is nearly twenty minutes!  There is no way that the users can be forced to carefully think through every field of data so that they put off responding to heart attacks with twenty minute delays to fill out database forms.  The person at the other end of the phone is often emotionally stressed, and not willing to work with the form filling operators.  

 

Similar constraints pertain to military systems, but even more so.  And even pedestrian applications like loan origination systems require fast interactive responsiveness, so that forcing every column of input to fit a needed filter (as would be required to force compliance with meta column semantics) is simply not a functional approach.  

 

But I do think that better analysis software, which can bridge the gap between the ontology needs and the information provider needs, would be valuable as a front end NLP filter.  Also, background software that can work on the data after it has been supposedly validated by the fast direct input routines, creating information from the shards of actual user input, could provide a truly useful and competitive advantage for any medium to large database, IMHO.  That is one reason why I wrote that document. 

 

HTH,

-Rich

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

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From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pavithra
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 6:50 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Language vs Logic

 

Rich,

Even if you are talking about AsIs Data base,   Ed Yourdon is the person started Structure Analysis concept later he wrote books about Object Oriented Analysis and Design with Peter Coad   ( I have signed copy of the book .)  I remember attending Peter Coad's lecture when he released the book in 1991.


People who studied these topics, follow the some analysis and design techniques all their lives.

This is the most interesting topic I read in a long time..    Thanks Dr. Sowa,
Pavithra



--- On Tue, 9/14/10, Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


From: Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Language vs Logic
To: "'[ontolog-forum] '" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 9:32 PM

John, Jim, Ed, Dave and et al,

 

I think this thread is going in the wrong direction entirely.  It seems to me that the effort should be focused on the English statements found in the AsIs database, and the ways in which AsIs users made errors in the database.  

 

In a recent case, I was able to show that over 40% of the rows in an actual database had errors of one kind or another in them – and not just the English statement fields, even the so called structured fields are like that.  

 

To show that, I had to write a program to extract the actual data in the database, not just the data fields which happen to be compliant with the meta data specifications.  Often, the entered data is "cleaned" by the software to meet the specs, but it often isn't the same semantics that the user entered, and is often clearly semantically different than what user intended.  Users just don’t much care how much sweat the managers, BAs, SysEs and SWEs have expended on their behalf.  They just use it to get their jobs done with a minimum of attention.  Remember that collecting data is not their major concern – they want the sales to go through no matter what they have to do to get there.  

 

Reengineering a database (not the code, but the data and data model) is itself a discovery process that has the usual four lower level processes running concurrently.  These are <Experimenting, Classifying, Observing, Theorizing>, as shown in the following chart of the sixteen way interactions among the four processes:  

 

 

Where each box in the figure begins with a number, that number correlates to a paragraph or longer description of the interaction for those two processes in the document at www.englishlogickernel.com/Patent-7-209-923-B1.PDF The approach described there uses corpus analysis and context modeling to discover the semantics used in the actual database.  Knowing that the information was perceived in a particular way by each front end user helps the development architects figure out how to design the ToBe system, and without it, that information is normally not available to the ToBe system designers.  

 

-Rich

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2

 

-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 5:50 PM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Ken Orr; Arun Majumdar
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Language vs Logic

 

Jim, Ed, Dave, and Rich,

 

I completely agree with what you say below  But I will add that

proper tools can make *many orders of magnitude* improvement --

e.g., going from 80 person years of tedious work to 15 person weeks

of more exciting stuff.

 

I realize that you're not going to believe what I say below, but you

can verify it by asking Ed Yourdon.  He did the initial consulting

before recommending Arun Majumdar and Andre Leclerc for a short

study project, which ended up in delivering exactly what a major

consulting firm claimed would take 80 person-years by the hand

methods that you describe.

 

Another person who is familiar with the project and all parties

involved is Ken Orr (on cc list above).

 

JR>> This is OK as long as you realize that data integrity and data

semantics are

>> contained in the applications, that you understand these legacy systems well

>> enough to be sure you understand the data semantics and that you can

>> reproduce them without error. Legacy databases are often full of codes that

>> are meaningless except when interpreted by the applications.

 

EB> Strongly agree.  Reverse engineering a "legacy" (read: existing/useful)

> database can be an intensely manual process.  Analysis of the

> application code can tell you what a data element is used for and how it

> is used/interpreted.  The database schema itself can only give you a

> name, a key set, and a datatype.  OK, SQL2 allows you to add a lot of

> rules about data element relationships, and presumably the ones that are

> actually written in the schema have some conceptual basis.

 

I also agree.  But it is possible to analyze the executable code and

compare it to *all* the English (or other NL) documentation -- that

includes specifications, requirements documents, manuals, emails,

rough notes, and transcriptions of oral remarks by users, managers,

programmers, etc.

 

For a brief summary of the requirements by the customer, the method

by which Arun and Andre conducted the "study", and the results,

stored on one CD-ROM, which were exactly what the customer wanted,

see slides 91 to 98 of the following:

 

    http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/iss.pdf

 

Just type "91" into the Adobe counter at the bottom of the screen

to go straight to those slides.

 

EB> Reverse engineering a database is the process of converting a data

> structure model back into the concept model that it implements.  And the

> problem is that the "forward engineering" mapping is not one to one from

> modeling_language_  to implementation_language_.  It is many-to-one,

> which means that a simple inversion rule is wrong much of the time, and

> the total effect of the simple rules on an interesting database schema

> is always to produce nonsense.  Application analysis has the advantage

> of context in each element interpretation; database schema analysis is

> exceedingly limited in that regard.

 

That is part of the job, but it doesn't solve the problem of 40 years

of legacy code with numerous patches and outdated documentation.

The customer's problem was (1) to *verify* the mapping between

documentation and implementation and report all discrepancies

(or at least as many a could be found), (2) to build a glossary of

all the English terminology with cross references to all the changes

over the years, (3) to build a data dictionary with a specification

that corresponded to the implementation, not to the obsolete

documentation, and (4) to cross reference all the English terms

with all the programming and database terms and all the changes

over the years.

 

EB> That said, other contextual knowledge can be brought to bear.  If, for

> example, you know that the database design followed some "information

> analysis method" and the database schema was then "generated"...

 

Good luck when some of the programs predated any kind of "methods",

other documentation was lost years ago, and the people who wrote

or patched the code retired, died, moved on, or just forgot.

 

EB> So, if you know the design method and believe it was used consistently

> and faithfully, you can code a reverse mapping that is complex but

> fairly reliable, but you still have to have human engineers looking over

> every detail and repairing the weird things....

 

Arun and Andre were the two engineers who checked anything that the

computer couldn't resolve automatically.  And the computer did indeed

discover a lot of weird stuff.  Look at slides 95 to 97 for a tiny

sample of weird.

 

But as they continued with the analysis, Arun and Andre found that

the computer's estimate of how certain it was about any conclusion

was usually right.  They raised the threshold, so that the computer

wouldn't ring a bell to alert them unless it was really uncertain

about some point.

 

DMcD> Most of the legacy systems we see were forward engineered once upon

> a time, but then modified in place, without going through the original

> model to design to code process.  So you have a mix of things that can

> be faithfully reverse engineered mixed in with things that just got bolted on.

 

Yes.  And when the code is up to 40 years old, there are a lot of

ad hoc bolts.  That's why the big consulting firm estimated that it

would require 80 person-years to do the job.  But Arun and Andre

did it in 15 person-weeks (while the computer worked 24/7).

 

RC> Personally, I have found that most AsIs DBs are useful histories

> of how people reacted to the expressed interfaces.  The code, which

> is supposed to interpret the fields, is often not consistent with

> the way people used the database.

 

That's true.  That's why you need to relate the implementation

to *all* the documentation by users of every kind as well as

by managers and programmers of every kind.  They all have

different views of the system, and it's essential to correlate

all their documents and cross reference them to each other and

to the actual implementation.

 

EB> Yes, you can be stuck with maintenance programmers and ignorant

> users.  But that means you are genuinely flying blind with respect

> to the actual data content and intent...

 

Yes, that's why the customer asked the consulting firm to analyze

all their software and all their documentation.  When that estimate

was too high, they asked Ed Yourdon for a second opinion, and he

called in Arun and Andre.   They delivered a solution that gave

the customer everything that the big firm claimed that they would

require 80 person-years to do.

 

Please read the slides.  And as I said, you don't have to take

my word for it.  There is also a Cutter Consortium technical

report written by Andre and Arun.  Ask Arun for a copy.  But

it doesn't say as much about the NLP technology as I wrote

on the iss.pdf slides.

 

John

 

 

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