----- Original Message -----
From: "Ron Wheeler" <rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2011 9:12 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Relating and Reconciling Ontologies (01)
> On 21/04/2011 1:36 PM, AzamatAbdoullaev wrote:
>> AA
>>> Interoperability is a critical idea needing depth and breadth
>>> and common foundation framework.
>> JS
>>> At that level of detail, we agree. But the framework must support
>>> existing systems, future systems, and people at all levels of education.
>> John,
>> We are in accord here.
>> But any thing, product, system, service, network, or technology to be
>> interoperable must be compatible with the same standard, ideally, with a
>> standard ontology.
>> Let me remind some key points mentioned in my last:
>> 1. There are nation-level programs as EU Interoperability Framework, USA
>> NIEM, or UK e-GIF.
>> 2. Interoperability in general implies common standards, specifications,
>> formats, categorizations and integration, unifying models and schemas.
>> 3. the General Interoperability Framework (GIF) is closely connected with
>> a
>> world/domain reference model as a common foundation ontology.
>> Take what closely concerns the most of the Forum: the US National
>> Information Exchange Model: http://www.niem.gov/. "It is designed to
>> develop, disseminate and support enterprise-wide information exchange
>> standards and processes that can enable jurisdictions to effectively
>> share
>> critical information in emergency situations, as well as support the
>> day-to-day operations of agencies throughout the nation."
>> Its syntactic operability is to be achieved by using the XML Schema data
>> model, constructs, and methods, seemingly, thus supporting existing
>> "legacy
>> systems", across all levels of the government, federal, state and local.
>> However, the issue of issues how to achieve computatable Semantic
>> Interoperability, among any and all communicating entities, legacy ones
>> or
>> not. Seemingly, by developing the GIF implying a fundamental set of basic
>> entities and relationships, providing the semantic basis (meaning
>> exchange/interpretation standards and processes) for more specialized
>> domains and fields and applications.
>> Given that, I am convinced that to obtain the General Semantic
>> Interoperability standard, costing hundreds billions per year, means to
>> develop a single world reference model, in the first place.
>> Azamat Abdoullaev
> Just not possible.
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.
Who gets to decide? There are too many stakeholders.
> Each stakeholder will have trouble giving up a view of the universe that
> has served their organization for years in order to fix someone else's
> problem with this view.
> We have survived an Imperial vs Metric world for 2 centuries with being
> able to agree on something so clear cut.
> We just make the conversions when we need to and the rest of the time we
> pick one.
> In Canada, we measure in metric but the frequently result is something
> that makes sense in inches (plywood comes in the metric equivalent of
> 4x8 feet sheets and no one has any idea about how big that is in metric).
>
> I have no expectation that the US Justice Department and the US
> Treasury are ever going to agree on some definitions of financial
> transactions.
AA: Lacking a common Financial Interoperbility Framework, they will endanger
the whole concept of the NIEM initiative, compromising public safety,
disaster management, justice and infrastructure protection, and homeland
security.
> The hierarchy of objects will probably never match and will be a problem
> for the people who have to define the interoperability rules for
> companies who need to take their own internal view of the universe and
> provide views for the external agencies that fit their hierarchies.
> Try telling the EU or the Chinese that they have adopt the US Treasury's
> view of the financial world.
AA: The assumption is too provocative, all big sides should go for a
Financial World Reference Model.
>
> Ron
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "John F. Sowa"<sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>> To: "[ontolog-forum]"<ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Cc: "Smith, Barry"<phismith@xxxxxxxxxxx>; "Azamat"<abdoul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2011 4:50 PM
>> Subject: Relating and Reconciling Ontologies
>>
>>
>>> Barry, Azamat, et al.,
>>>
>>> The note copied below was addressed to the Ontology Summit list.
>>> But it addresses important issues that should be discussed in the
>>> wider forum. I presented some related slides there on Tuesday:
>>>
>>> http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/par.pdf
>>>
>>> The concluding slide 6 advocated automated methods for relating
>>> ontologies to one another and for extracting ontologies from
>>> legacy software and from natural language texts. This morning,
>>> I added some pointers to suggested readings for further detail.
>>>
>>> BS
>>>> 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).
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> BS
>>>> Can John point to examples of practically useful mappings created
>>>> and updated automatically through appeal to some sort of Lindenbaum
>>>> lattice-based technology?
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> AA
>>>> Interoperability is a critical idea needing depth and breadth
>>>> and common foundation framework.
>>> At that level of detail, we agree. But the framework must support
>>> existing systems, future systems, and people at all levels of
>>> education. (And even experts in one field are novices in others.)
>>>
>>> 1. There are trillions of dollars of legacy software that run the
>>> world economy. It won't be replaced for a long, long time.
>>>
>>> 2. Anything that replaces a legacy system has to interoperate with
>>> it during a long period of transition. In fact, most systems
>>> that replace a legacy system build on and extend the implicit
>>> ontology in the old system.
>>>
>>> 3. Anything that depends on people using unique identifiers must
>>> address the problem that even experts in a subject can't agree
>>> on what codes or categories to assign.
>>>
>>> John
>>>
>>> -------- Original Message --------
>>> Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] Official Communique Feedback Thread
>>> Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2011 10:39:51 -0400
>>> From: Barry Smith
>>> To: Ontology Summit 2011 discussion<ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 9:50 AM, John F. Sowa<sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>> AGC
>>>>> ... having one single ontology does not solve the problem. actually
>>>>> IMHO it does not solve anything. it could probably be a good idea to
>>>>> address the issue of interoperability across ontologies rather than
>>>>> pretending to have "one ontology per domain".
>>>> Yes, indeed.
>>>>
>>>> There are already a huge number of implemented and proposed ontologies,
>>>> and the largest number of potential ontologies comes from the trillions
>>>> of dollars of legacy software. The total number is finite, but it is
>>>> sufficiently large that infinity is the only practical upper bound.
>>>>
>>>> BS
>>>>> Who will keep the N-squared mappings up to date, for an N that is
>>>>> increasing, if AGC gets his way, without limit? Who will pay for this
>>>>> ever increasing mapping effort? Who will oversee the mapping effort?
>>>> The only reasonable solution is to provide automated methods for
>>>> discovering the mappings. Adolf Lindenbaum showed how to do that
>>>> over 80 years ago -- it's called the Lindenbaum lattice.
>>>>
>>>> For a brief survey, see Section 6 and 7 of the following paper:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/rolelog.pdf
>>>>
>>>> John
>>> It would be nice, if it worked. But in practice, at least in the areas
>>> with which I am familiar, it doesn't. 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). See e.g. the papers by Bodenreider (who does the best work in
>>> this field) listed here:
>>>
>>> http://mor.nlm.nih.gov:8000/pubs/offi.html
>>>
>>> (and especially the items co-authored with Zhang).
>>> Can John point to examples of practically useful mappings created and
>>> updated automatically through appeal to some sort of Lindenbaum
>>> lattice-based technology?
>>>
>>> BS
>>
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