Dear Amanda,
You seem to have some practical experience
in dealing with the plurality of opinions on ontologies. At the bottom of this
post, you mention stating the “requirements” for an ontology to be used in real
applications. I think you could help the field by documenting those
requirements in English (not logic) and offering them in one detailed
requirements document that could become a model for how to develop a useful
ontology. Such a requirements document hasn’t been published to my knowledge
precisely because there have been no experienced managers of successful
ontology teams willing to document the pragmatics of ontology development.
Perhaps you can be the one who makes that
requirements document available as a standard of some sort.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Amanda Vizedom
Sent: Sunday, February 19, 2012
9:08 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What goes into a Lexicon?
David,
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 10:41, David Eddy <deddy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
At one point I entertained delusions that ontologies would help with
this issue (one conceptual label = many physical labels). Obviously I no
longer hope in that direction.
That's a shame, and a failure of the ontologies you've worked with.
Many ontologies and applications exist that *do* help with this. From
federated information integration to multilingual search and retrieval to
cross-domain (or even just multi-user-type) systems of all sorts, there are
numerous existing ontology usages in which the ability to help with this issue
is a key benefit of ontologies and a critical part of the application's
success.
There are also plenty of insufficiently trained ontologists who do not
understand the concept/_expression_ distinction sufficiently. I have been
known to have long technical discussions in which I ban the use of
"term" "vocabulary" and several other expressions that are,
in practice, ambiguous between the conceptual thing and the lexical thing; that
was an extreme action necessitated by a lack of consistent understanding across
the development team, such that some would revert to thinking of ontological
things lexically. That meant both applying unsuitable design criteria to the
ontology *and* failing to capture the lexical expressions and relationship
appropriately. Not to mention massive bog-downs as people debate what
"location" "really means", when there is no ontological
conflict; there are simply multiple, distinct, and significant concepts which
should be captured in the ontology, defined sufficiently (in formalisms, not
just text annotations) to capture the differences between them, and mapped
lexically (i.e., given the label, etc.) to "location."
This is often a training and personnel issue. It is also, IMNSHO, one
of the areas in which ontology as a field can improve by developing explicit
dimensions of ontology requirement specification and explicit, experience- and
research-backed guidelines regarding ontology features and characteristics that
are suitable or necessary for an ontology that must meet those various
requirements.
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