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On Wednesday, October 12, 2011 11:47 AM, Davod Price wrote:
"While I hate to suggest anything that might separate the Ontolog Forum
participants from their marketeering friends ...
1) Why doesn't the Ontolog
Forum take it upon itself to promote a replacement to Gruber's 'standard'
definition with an accurate, useful one similar to above?
2) Why doesn't the
Ontolog Forum take it upon itself to become editor of ontology/reasoning
(computer science) on Wikipedia and maintain the new 'standard' definition
there? Gruber's paper could even be marked as 'obsolete' in the
references."
To come to truth is the hardest human enterprise. And most challenges are
coming from humans themselves, our mental models. We are largely guided by
default mind-sets, be it science, logics, politics, business, or routine
practice. Obsolete mental mentals are used to protect themselves from any change
or innovation, operating on a sort of routine autopilot.
We have to recognize the scientific minds are also inclined to
short-term scenarios: focusing on deadlines, immediate priorities and trivial
assumptions, prevailing rules and procedures, cost-effective things and
financial performance. Although, the world is moved by long-term visions
and strategies, potentials and opportunities, and new inclusive approaches. It
seems few people are ready for reprogramming their autopilot mentality, and even
few people to enterprise opening new horizons and frontiers. It all carries some
risk of losing the comfort zone.
Azamat Abdoullaev
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2011 11:47
AM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] the Zachman
Enterprise Ontology
Actually ... could almost point everyone to Wikipedia on this
one:
In computer science and
information
science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of
concepts within a domain, and the
relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about
the entities within that domain, and may be used to describe the
domain.
and therefore Zachman is not an ontology. It's what the most
recent summit links to. Unfortunately, the link to reason then says on humans
can do it:-(
Also unfortunately, Formal ontology is on
Wikipedia:
A formal ontology is an ontology with a structure
that is guided and defined through axioms. The goal of a formal
ontology is to provide an unbiased (domain- and
application-independent) view on reality.
Formal ontologies are founded upon a specific formal upper level
ontology, which provides consistency checks for the
entire ontology and, if applied properly, allows the modeler to avoid possibly
erroneous ontological assumptions encountered in modeling large-scale
ontologies.
While I hate to suggest anything that might separate the
Ontolog Forum participants from their marketeering friends ...
1) Why
doesn't the Ontolog Forum take it upon itself to promote a replacement to
Gruber's 'standard' definition with an accurate, useful one similar to
above?
2) Why doesn't the Ontolog Forum take it upon itself to become
editor of ontology/reasoning (computer science) on Wikipedia and maintain the
new 'standard' definition there? Gruber's paper could even be marked as
'obsolete' in the references.
If opposed to Wikipedia, then somewhere
more authoritative that can be linked from Wikipedia and elsewhere might do
... (e.g. a NIST ontology definition page).
Cheers,
David
On
10/12/2011 4:54 AM, David C. Hay wrote:
At 10:09 AM 10/11/2011, you wrote:
Content-Language:
en-US
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boundary="_000_919F5BFA2404AB48BCA20A05A406B177278B1D5397EMV64UKRDdoma_"
I
was asked a question the other day and as I don?t think I reached a
satisfactory answer I thought I would seek more learned opinion and
post the question to this board. The question I was asked was ?what does
it mean when the new Zachman framework declares itself as an ontology and
specifically the Enterprise Ontology? and to quote the Zachman.com website
?the Framework is the ontology for describing the
Enterprise?
So what does something have to be to call itself
an ontology and perhaps more so in the commercial sector.
I like Ed's definition: "the
language has a grammar and an interpretation of the grammatical constructs
that is suitable for automated reasoning," although being "suitable for
automation" does not mean that it has been done.
What John has is a
collection of completely different approaches to describing the world.
The differences in perspective, represented by the rows makes it very
difficult to call the framework as a whole an ontology. I did attempt
to produce a metamodel of a large part of the framework a couple of years
ago (Data Model Patterns: A Metadata Map), and I suppose that
metamodel could be called an ontology. But my experience with the
framework is that only the row I have renamed the "Architect's View" (Row
Three, what John had called the "system designer's view") produces a true,
conceptual picture of the organization. The "business owners' views"
are multiple, overlapping, and often contradictory. The whole
point of Row Three is to construct a coherent, single view of the
organization that encompasses all the particular business owners'
views.
From row four down, you are describing technology, not the
business.
In the spirit of the architect's view (and focusing
on data only), I attempted to create an enterprise ontology in my new book
this year, Enterprise Model Patterns: Describing the World. I
would love to hear anyone's views as to whether I succeeded or not.
The "language" involved is conceptual entity/relationship modeling.
(OK, I bent UML to accommodate that, even though this is not the intended
use of UML. But the effect was a clean e/r model.) You won't be able
to do inferences until the model is translated into OWL or some such, but I
believe the components required are all there.
I welcome all flavors
of criticism.
Thanks!
Dave Hay
Don?t get me wrong
as I have a lot of respect for the work John Zachman has done and I have
used the framework on several occasions as an aid to strategy and
architecture. I was unfortunately unable to say to my colleague that
I thought it represented a formal ontology in the way I am familiar
with. I explained that I worked for three years on an ontology that
had undergone over 10 years of research, testing and construction in
Protégé and that it was formally accepted by public bodies in the UK and
is in active use in the health sector. There are other major ontologies
that have undergone similar if not more effort to construct. Yet without
that formal approach how are you able to depend upon the
model?
So our discussion lead to several
conclusions;
1/ Perhaps the Zachman Framework is enough in
itself to be called an ontology as why should it have to be developed with
an ontology editor and undergo formal construction and reviews and
acceptance by a public body (maybe it has and this is not in the public
domain). It is not the kind of ontology developed in the science fields
and used for example in the health sector. Zachman International is
a private company and thus is free to declare what it wants.
2/ The Zachman framework is more of a metamodel and
collection of concepts that a company then licences the Framework to build
their own enterprise ontology. This of course places all of the hard work
on the company unless Zachman International plans to provide an OWL or
Frames ontology in the future.
3/ Finally, a more
controversial conclusion that this is not enough and is more of a
marketing ploy to capitalise on the increasing interest in the commercial
sector in ontologies and the semantic web.
Perhaps I am
viewing this incorrectly and being too formal in my thinking. I would be
grateful for any thoughts that might provide a better
conclusion.
Thanks,
Marc
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