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Re: [ontolog-forum] Relating and Reconciling Ontologies

To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 24 Apr 2011 23:49:16 -0400
Message-id: <4DB4EF3C.3020503@xxxxxxxxxxx>
David and Doug,    (01)

DE
>> For 20+ years I've watched folks tilt at the "one correct standard
>> name across the enterprise".   Never going to happen.    (02)

DF
> Agreed.  We need to let users know that we are not standardizing
> the terminology they use, but are establishing mappings between
> their terms and ontological structures.    (03)

I agree.  But I'd like to emphasize some points in the slides I
presented last Tuesday:    (04)

    http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/par.pdf    (05)

Note the bottom of slide 6:
> Desired result:
> ● Common tools that are integrated with all technologies.
> ● Automated extraction of ontologies from NL texts.
> ● Automated extraction of ontologies from legacy software.
> ● Automated integration of all ontologies from any source.    (06)

The desired result of "Automated extraction of ontologies
from legacy software" is not just an idle wish.    (07)

Look at the following excerpt on slide 7:
> Slides that illustrate some of the automated methods:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/pursue.pdf
> ● See slides 3 to 9 for methods of aligning ontologies.
> ● See slides 25 to 32 for extracting ontology from legacy software.
> ● See slides 33 to 41 for extracting ontology from a textbook
>   and using it to interpret research reports.    (08)

These are the kinds of things that we have been doing with the
VivoMind software.  At the moment, we're just doing it on a
contract-by-contract basis as we develop the technology.    (09)

DE
> I posit that we need something that discovers the names/labels in the
> context of their native use (my SME having worked with M0760 for 30+
> years) & associate them with the other similar/like things.    (010)

That kind of thing has been done successfully.    (011)

See slide 27 from the pursue.pdf file to see the kind of texts
that were analyzed and compared to the COBOL programs.  Look at
slide 29 to see what the customer wanted:
> Glossary, data dictionary, data flow diagrams, process architecture,
> system context diagrams.    (012)

The data dictionary specified the names of the fields in the database
and the COBOL programs that accessed them.  The glossary contained
English sentences extracted from the documentation (including the
comments in the COBOL programs) that defined the terms and related
them to the programs.  The glossary also included cross references
to the data dictionary and the COBOL programs.    (013)

DE
> So far I have not seen any interest in the ontology world for this
> issue.  Can ontologies be relevant to dealing with legacy systems?    (014)

Most ontologists are academics who have never seen a living, breathing
customer who uses things like COBOL and SQL -- in fact, they turn up
their noses at COBOL and SQL.  They think that customers have use cases
for "decidability".    (015)

If they ever talked to real customers, they might have discovered
use cases for problems that customers actually worry about.    (016)

John    (017)

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