[ontolog-forum] Ontology, Analogies and Mapping Disparate Fields

[Ali SH <asaegyn+out@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Just wanted to pass along a link to an ontology related story (though it's barely framed as such) in a relatively mainstream technology news outlet:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-link-patterns-spider-silk-melodies.html

While these are the originating papers (http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1111/1111.5297.pdf [1]) and (http://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/informatics/ologs--basic.pdf [2])

It seems to me that the author is reinventing the wheel (though with a nice twist re formulating / expressing o-logs and "sketches"). 

Especially since their review of the ontology field (in the ologs--basic.pdf paper) seems to extend only to RDF/OWL and completely ignores (or misses) work on Common Logic, conceptual graphs and the most glaring omission - the work on category theory in Bremen. Incidentally, such an omission appears to be an unfortunate corollary of the crowding out of any non-RDF/OWL work.

In any event, it's interesting work, though the correlation between the two seemingly disparate fields (spider silks and melody) reminds me more of the seminal "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" speech - http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html [3]

A lot of semantic mapping to date has indeed focused on DL level mappings (cf Euzenat & Shvaiko's Ontology Matching book [4]), but there is a rich set of logical mappings which can capture a lot of these structural similarities between disparate fields. I know I've repeated this claim before, but the limited expressivity of DL's mutes many of these mappings, because well, they generally aren't captured (can't be expressed) in the formalism. There is something to be said for picking the correct language to describe a domain, where difficult problems become much simpler. I suspect this will be one of the first major obstacles in orchestrating services based on LOD sets beyond the low hanging fruit currently being explored. 

In a previous discussion with Bijan, we were talking past each other re reasoning over expressive ontologies. I kept on talking about reasoning "off-line", while he insisted such projects were fatally intractable. I later realized the disconnect was that I was talking about verifying an expressive ontology (which you only need to do once, hence off-line), while he was thinking that you need to process the entire ontology for every query. Verification need be done only once (and indeed, off-line), while the deployment of queries over fragments of the ontology can then deploy more optimized tools.

I think there's an attractive case for articulating in some way, in some place, an expressive version of an ontology, even if for certain services / tasks you only deploy a decidable fragment of said ontology. For one, it can greatly facilitate semantic mappings, while secondly, it makes the entire project more upwards compatible, especially as the major DL's are continually adding greater expressivity. The expressive version of the reference ontology can function a sort of road map for deployment, a sort of technology agnostic commitment, whereas DL or otherwise deployed artifacts are technology dependent products / services...

Lastly, I'd point out that the group at the University of Toronto does have a paper on this topic (modularizing and reducing expressive ontologies into ontologies of other types that preserve the logical structure of the models), which has the incidental benefit of being able to identify logical similarity between theories according to an open repository... I will see if I have permission to distribute a pre-print to the list (Michael?).

===

[1] Tristan Giesa, David I. Spivak and Markus J. Buehler "Reoccurring Patterns in Hierarchical Protein Materials and Music: The Power of Analogies" BioNanoScience Volume 1, Number 4, 153–161, DOI: 10.1007/s12668-011-0022-5 

[2] D.I. Spivak, R.E. Kent “Ologs: a categorical framework for knowledge representation". PLoS ONE (in press): e24274. (2011) doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024274

[3] Wigner, E. P. (1960). "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. Richard courant lecture in mathematical sciences delivered at New York University, May 11, 1959". Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13: 1–14. doi:10.1002/cpa.3160130102.

[4] Jérôme Euzenat, Pavel Shvaiko. Ontology Matching. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg (DE), 2007

Best,

Ali

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