William, Todd Schneider is the chair of the NCOIC working group responsible for the SCOPE model and is also a member of this forum. We have weekly WebEx sessions in which we are currently reviewing/revising the questionnaire version of the SCOPE model. Each question represents a scope dimension or subdimension, and the possible answer values represent points along that dimensional scale, chosen for ease of understanding, reasonably objective “measurability”, and likely significance of value ranges. There are also guidance comments associated with the questions and some answer values for a workshop facilitator to use in eliciting responses from domain/stakeholder workshop participants. I suspect Todd would welcome your participation in the WebEx sessions if you are interested/have time. I believe he’s be willing to share the questionnaire spreadsheet as well, with the proviso that it doesn’t yet represent an NCOIC product approved for public release. I suspect it will always be a work in progress in any case, even if some version or set of versions is approved for public release at some points in the future. Hans From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of William Frank
Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2012 7:38 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] How do Practioners Use Ontologies? WAS Re: doing standards [was - Re: Webby objects] Hans, Thanks for this. NCOIC and SCOPE deal with subjects that are very important to me,
I have found ways to provide just-in-time multiple overlapping very small domain models **within** the context of a single mission of a single enterprise (not for a conglomerate like a money center bank, but for an enterprise mission, such as cash management). BUT this does not translate to the overlaps in an economic ecosystem.
On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Hans Polzer <hpolzer@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: William, Your points about domain ontologies underscore a general issue I have with much of the discussion in this forum, and helps explain why there isn’t more practical application of ontologies. Specifically, we don’t have a general way to specify the scope of a domain or the scope of applicability of a given ontology.
Ah, there is the rub, all right.
So practitioners are naturally reluctant to use an ontology (or someone else’s data models) because it is hard for them to determine whether it will work within their particular context and domain scope.
And most of them have had experiences in attempting to do so and had gotten burned by implicit scope assumptions in such ontologies.
I think that in addition to scope issues, as a secondary issue, as many here have suggested, the degree of specificity of "off the shelf" ontologies and data models is often too detailed: meanings in a narrow enough speech community are fully shared, while they are much more underspecified among related communities and in larger contexts. I say 'secondary' for what is suggested to me by what you say below: it would seem that we need to define domain scopes,and adjacencies, before we can identify what are the specializations of meaning that apply in a given context (domain) vs. what is common to the meanings among adjacent contexts.
I include domain categorization schemes as a form of domain scope dimensionality. This is the key source of interoperability issues across system, domain, and enterprise boundaries. It is the reason than NCOIC developed the SCOPE model (Systems, Capabilities, Operations, Programs, and Enterprises). Note that the “O” in SCOPE could just as easily have stood for Ontologies, and the “C” for Context. It also applies to Domains, so we could have named it “SCOPED”. SCOPE is not theoretical and it does not try to be definitive or “closed” because there are so many overlapping domains, enterprises, and contexts. It is a “let me count the ways” multi-dimensional model, similar to the “micro-theories” concept in CYC.
And i a very different approach to being "practical" than that of schema.org. (when I asked about some of my puzzlements about schema.org on this forum, I got two excellent statements, one from John Sowa, and another from another major contributor both saying what most ontology people would agree with : to be something we name is to be a thing or an entity. But this is NOT true in the schema.org model, which is what puzzled me, as well as the fact that if my designers believed schema.org, then when I tell them what an event is, as a key upper ontology concept to be used in systems designs in a particular way, they will tell me no, I am wrong, an 'event' is something with attendees that are people or organizations. (*my* events usually have attendees that are things like service requestors, service providers, and access controllers).
I’m sure that more extensive/exhaustive models of scope can be developed, but SCOPE is a good start for the domain of systems and people/agents interacting over a network connection.
Once practitioners have a standard way of being explicit about the scope of their application(s) and developers of tools/applications/ontologies can do likewise, then they will be more willing to use what others on the network provide, whether that be “standard” ontologies, data models, services, or data sources. Hans PS: We are working to develop a spreadsheet version of SCOPE that is more usable in practitioner contexts than the current publicly released version of SCOPE available at https://www.ncoic.org/technology/deliverables/scope/ We’d be happy to have pragmatic inputs from participants in this forum regarding ontology/domain/context/etc. scope dimensionality and how to characterize those dimensions in ways that practitioners find reasonably intuitive and objectively measurable. Pragmatic guidance regarding which scope dimensions are “safe to ignore” in specific (i.e., explicitly scoped) contexts and domains would also be much appreciated.
I think this would be an excellent topic for discussion. Only the SCOPE document is a little large. It will probably take till Christmas before I can read it.
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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