There is another important component to “view” or “context”, per the Powerpoint slides I sent out a few days back. Specifically, they have scope. And scope has numerous dimensions that might be relevant. For example, scope could be organizational, national, or functional, business process/model and technical domain in nature, or even cultural (such as slang peculiar to certain demographic segments) or all of these to some degree. I’m reminded of a presentation by a NASA rep at a conference on interoperability discussing spatial data services. At first I thought it odd that the title of his presentation didn’t use the term “geospatial”. Then when I listened to his pitch and he mentioned that a key input parameter to his web service request was a planet ID, it suddenly became clear to me. Interestingly, planet ID itself has implicit context scope dimensions, as the recent controversy regarding the “demotion” of Pluto’s planet status underscores. Size of body is one obvious scope dimension at work here. Less obvious scope dimensions might be type of body/entity (stars, moons, comets, spaceships, etc.), body attributes (liquid surface, gaseous surface, solid surface, granular surface, chemical compositions, whether the body is owned/claimed by any nation, etc.) and body behavioral types (e.g., circular orbit, elliptical orbit, retrograde orbit, non-orbital bodies, powered bodies, unpowered but steered bodies (solar sails), relativistic motion or not, etc.). Whether the particular ontology at issue is impacted by any of these or other scope dimensions depends on the intended usage contexts. The context scope dimensions can also suggest the need for multiple distinct domain-specific ontologies for different portions of context scope “space” (pun intended). J I think it’s also important to consider that contexts might be shared between two or more participants. However, each participant may have very different views or perspectives on that shared context and associated scope dimensions. Consider being stopped for speeding, and the respective perspectives of the driver being stopped, the police officer executing the stop, the civil authorities of the jurisdiction in which the stop occurred, the jurisdiction of the driver’s license issuing authority, the owner of the car, the car insurance company, the court in which the ticket will be prosecuted, etc. Note that the police officer executing the stop might not be in the same jurisdiction as where the stop occurs, especially if there was some type of chase (which also affects the perspective of the officer on that newly shared traffic stop context). Maybe to officer mistyped the license plate number of the car being stopped, or it’s an out of jurisdiction plate for which information is not available. The police officer may think that the car is stolen, and approach the driver’s car with gun at the ready. The jurisdiction of the police officer may want to have a video camera capturing the encounter. Very little of these perspectives will be shared by the driver (unless the vehicle is indeed, stolen). Hans From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Eddy
Sent: Wednesday, February 29, 2012 11:43 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What goes into a Lexicon? Leo - On Feb 29, 2012, at 9:09 AM, Obrst, Leo J. wrote:
Almost every “view” or “context” has two components: 1) the ontology view, i.e., the projection of a subset of classes, properties, axioms, etc., from the ontology, to satisfy a specific application need, and 2) the vocabulary to be associated with the elements of the ontology view. I think I agree. So what's the purpose/value/utility of the ontology view? If grunts are working away with their local vocabularies/jargon/local opaque language (& VERY unlikely to be aware of the ontology in the background), what is the value add of the ontology? |