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Re: [ontolog-forum] What goes into a Lexicon?

To: "'[ontolog-forum] '" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Rich Cooper" <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2012 12:34:24 -0800
Message-id: <474D2B560E014EBDABAAE59B21B0793F@Gateway>

Dear David,

 

You wrote:

A single (admittedly large) transportation organization has found:

 

  - 3000 interfaces

  - costing between $145,000 to $450,000 per year

 

Do the very crude math & you get a cost approximating $1B/year.

 

I have been told these numbers, but I have not been able to confirm them with the "author."

 

That is certainly a buncha money!  But the question I am trying to pin down (so I can explain it to others clearly) is why ontologies provide better approaches to this expensive task than present practice does. 

 

Why are we so sure that, if the said transportation company develops an ontology for each of these interfaces, that the cost will be reduced?  I don’t think that has been clearly enough established that I could present it in a court of law as anything other than opinion.  It would be much nicer to have a first-principles demonstration about why an ontology would reduce the effort required and therefore would reduce costs.  I don’t see such a first-principles argument yet that could make the conclusion more objectively than just a simple opinion. 

 

We have all stayed on this list for years because we believe that ontologies have value.  What I would like is a clear economic proof that interfacing cost is reduced.  Absent that, I would like any kind of proof that an ontology has value. 

 

But that doesn’t mean that ontologies don’t have other value besides interfacing.  They could also provide a more elegant, and hence more communicable, vocabulary among developers, at least in principle.  But that hasn’t been established by our experience on this list either.  We have yet to come to a consensus about any nontrivial ontology so far. 

 

To sell ontology, we will need clear demonstrations of its value.  I don’t think we have that yet. 

 

-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 David Eddy
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2012 10:21 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What goes into a Lexicon?

 

Rich -

 

On Mar 1, 2012, at 12:22 PM, Rich Cooper wrote:



If so, I still hold that the cost of hiring the export/import contractor is a one time thing and simple tuning of one export/import project is usually enough for the second project.

 

Let's try some allegedly real numbers:

 

A single (admitedly large) transportation organization has found:

 

    - 3000 interfaces

    - costing between $145,000 to $450,000 per year

 

Do the very crude math & you get a cost approximating $1B/year.

 

I have been told these numbers, but I have not been able to confirm them with the "author."

 

___________________

David Eddy

 

781-455-0949

 


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