Barry Smith wrote:
>> The mappings I know of between ontologies in practical use
>> (for example between different anatomy ontologies) involve very
>> costly manual effort, and even then they are still imperfect
>> (and fragile as the mapped ontologies themselves change).
>
John F. Sowa wrote:
> I agree.
>
> Even worse, inter-annotator agreement among professionals who use
> the ontologies (and the related terminologies) is very poor. At
> the Ontology Summit, I was discussing the issues with a physician
> who cited a discouraging result: agreement between any two
> ophthalmologists who assign SNOMED codes to a set of cases is
> about 60%.
>
> The annotators don't even agree with themselves. In the study,
> the experimenters retested exactly the same ophthalmologists
> a year later on a subset of exactly the same cases. For each
> of the "experts", their new answers had about a 60% agreement
> with their answers the year before.
>
> This is the fatal flaw in any system that depends on human experts
> to link real-world data to formal definitions. Unique identifiers
> of formal definitions are hopelessly unreliable in any system that
> depends on human annotators to select an option from a menu.
>
Barry Smith wrote:
>> Can John point to examples of practically useful mappings created
>> and updated automatically through appeal to some sort of Lindenbaum
>> lattice-based technology?
>
John F. Sowa wrote:
> Yes, indeed. Every *correct* alignment of any two ontologies that
> has ever been done by human or machine is a successful application
> of the mappings shown in a Lindenbaum lattice.
>
> The lattice is actually a very simple structure that can be
> specified on one page. It is the formal foundation for every
> method of theory revision or ontology alignment.
>
> The lattice is like arithmetic. People were counting on their
> fingers long before Peano stated his axioms. The theory doesn't
> say that counting on fingers is bad, but it can distinguish sound
> methods from flaky ones. Furthermore, it can provide guidelines
> for designing automated and semi-automated tools that can be
> much faster and more reliable than finger exercises.
>
John,
You are not responding to my request:
>>Can you point to examples of practically useful mappings created
>> and updated automatically through appeal to some sort of Lindenbaum
>> lattice-based technology?
BS (01)
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