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:
- 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."
781-455-0949