+1 From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of William Frank
Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2012 3:30 PM
To: Godfrey Rust; [ontolog-forum]
Subject: [ontolog-forum] How do Practioners Use Ontologies? WAS Re: doing standards [was - Re: Webby objects] My experience is very much like Godfrey.s, and I applaud all his remarks:
People ARE creating and using ontologies, in the manners he describes. And, in financial services they have for some time, starting publically maybe FPM, but this is what they were doing at Citibank and Fidelity when I consulted at both places in the early 1990s, and they did masterful and useful work. (This happened in Financial Services for a variety of reasons -- but I am trying to take to heart Peter Y's remark that this forum is for "water cooler" discussions, and so trying to avoid side topics)
The key point to me is that the fancy, experimental tools get in the way of business people who are the ones who have to own this stuff, and present risks for enterprise IT. The most complete and effective low level domain ontologies have seen is usually done in EXCEL. OTOH, there are works such as many by David Hay's, Haim, Kilov's, Rubin Diaz, Eric Evans, and others in the conceptual business modelling world, whose work is ignored because they don't CALL what they are doing "ontology", and they don't use the 'right' tools. (They might and often do use UML class/nstance models, or an E/R tool, with their own semantics and annotations to make it legible without an interpreter to business people). I know one financial services company where they use EXCEL for the business definitions, and have built tools to map to OWL.
As Godfrey says, doing it this way echos much of the advice that John Sowa provides. For example, "upper ontologies" are often expressed through some mechanism such as stereotypes, (or Peter Codds "colors", etc.,) keeping them very underspecified, and the domain ontology is constructed using entirely different, domain-centric organizing principles based on hierachies but mostly parts and wholes, as one goes deeper.
Wm
On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 1:27 PM, Godfrey Rust <godfrey.rust@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Nov 22, 2012, at 10:24 AM, Peter Yim wrote:
The basic question is "Why aren't practitioners using
ontologies?"
> David Eddy wrote: Because they're really, really, really HARD, aside from the fact that management has no idea what all the handwaving is about much > less what any potential value might be. +1, and my two pence worth on this, from the perspective of a long-term data modeller/ontologist/business analyst who is not a computer scientist or programmer. John Sowa has often pointed out that the majority of OWL ontologies in use are basically just class/subclass and/or whole/part hierarchies with possibly one or two other constraints. We’ve built a couple of dozen like that. In the content/media industries it is now commonplace for standards and organizations to rely on complex sets of controlled vocabularies, usually involving hierarchies. Anyone who needs to know that Belgium is a part of Europe when using ISO territory codes has those requirements. Yesterday I was with a modeller from a large media organization who has developed an extensible seven-dimensional matrix of rights management categories containing hundreds of terms and permutations, guaranteed to grow and develop substantially on a regular basis and needing to map to complex vocabularies and schemas in other internal and external systems. I am sure this scenario is not uncommon for many members of ontolog (on this point I don’t entirely agree with David about large businesses not caring any more about their “naming conventions” – I think that is changing). This modeller had a quite rich and complex ontology, but it was in an Excel spreadsheet and he didn’t call it an ontology (actually he was doing so by the end of our meeting after I had pointed out to him what it was). What he needs is ways of managing and using it that are as familiar as updating a spreadsheet and writing some _javascript_s or SQL procedures but give him the usefulness of an ontology independent of procedural rules. In our own work we build all our ontologies in Excel and then parse them out into RDF/OWL, XML or whatever is needed. I used to think we would use some “proper” tools like Protege eventually, but we’ve never found one remotely as flexible, fast and powerful as Excel for data creation and management functions. We have a problem though, because Excel doesn’t give us the persistence and audit capabilities of a database so it’s inadequate for ongoing maintenance of a multi-user ontology (though as David suggests, hardly anyone is using those anyway). I’m not talking here about ontologies and systems which are used for deducing and discovering new facts from disparate data sets or masses of messy data, as Watson does, as I don’t know anything about those. I’m talking about knocking the basic and increasing complex type vocabularies of medium or large organizations into shape, and allowing them to be reasoned over and transformed in effective and extensible ways independent of procedural code. If an ontology is regarded as a structured data dictionary that can be integrated into your everyday systems using tools and languages that you are familiar with to store your controlled vocabularies in a way that also give you some good reasoning power, extensibility and interoperability, then it has potential takers. It might in some hands be taken on to all kinds of delightful hand-wavingy things, but that’s where some tools would be helpful. As an analyst I am regularly able to persuade potential clients that an ontology can be really useful to them, and then they go and spoil it all by asking how they can implement it. John S’s checklist of questions looks a good place to start. Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2012 5:17 PM Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] doing standards [was - Re: Webby objects] Peter - On Nov 22, 2012, at 10:24 AM, Peter Yim wrote:
The basic question is "Why aren't practitioners using
ontologies?"
Because they're really, really, really HARD, aside from the fact that management has no idea what all the handwaving is about much less what any potential value might be. Plus the little detail of there being no foundation. So ontologies are very much ivory towers in the clouds, particularly in commercial IT. Science/bio/pharma may very well be a different story since Mother nature has been carving the hierarchy for a few million years. In commercial systems the concept of ordered hierarchies & languages is at best a distant fantasy. It has been my direct, commercial experience with Fortune 500 organizations that very few (approaching none) have anything approaching something simple as "naming standards" (conventions—3 ring binders on the shelf, yes. Enforced no.). Obviously some systems have naming conventions, but that was typically driven by a single motivated individual & is not carried over to the next systems(s). Please to acknowledge the scale here... a Fortune 500 scale organization will have something like 1,000 to 5,000+ IBM mainframe applications. This is not counting client/server, web, *nix, iSeries, etc. Pretty much every one of those applications will have uniquely opaque language. I would argue that if the organization does not have the discipline to control its language something as pie-in-the-sky as ontologies is a castle in the sand. The reasoning/experience is that if they're as big & important as they are without naming standards, why bother. It is my assumption the same thinking & non-action carries over to the much more complex ontology domain. If the ontology consultant (that's singular) could show up on Monday & create something substantive in a week or two, AND get easy-to-use & understand results into the hands of the grunts, things would likely be different. Requiring the grunts—the data entry/programmer/analyst folks doing the work—to learn yet another collection of technical languages is not a route to adoption. Does anything in the ontology domain deliver something that's as easy-to-use & mindlessly useful as a spellchecker? Protege may be a wonderful product, but it's not even remotely close to being an end-user tool.
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