ontolog-forum
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [ontolog-forum] Why a data model does not an ontology make

To: Ontolog Forum <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: segun alayande <salayande@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2013 14:51:42 +0000
Message-id: <DUB114-W875AAD50A762F7B6896338A7DD0@xxxxxxx>
<JS>Unfortunately, there was never a standard for a conceptual schema, and
the vendors merely pasted the term 'conceptual schema' on top of what
they were doing anyway. They turned it into an advertising slogan.</JS>

I was made to understand that the purpose of a model, its audience and its intended use often determine the notation,degree of formality, complexity etc. It may be difficult to standardise notations, language and formality underpinning a conceptual model. Conceptual models are used as mind-maps (at a personal level), as an abstraction layer in software engineering and in various types of knowledge codification schemes. These different domains having different requirements.

<JS> E-R-A + cardinality is a requirement that must be specified in any
conceptual schema (or ontology), but it's far from sufficient.
And most of the published OWL ontologies do little or nothing
to go beyond that level.</JS>
I have developed a conceptual layer of an enterprise information model, that comprises of taxonomic and network relationships. In the network relations, the intention was to capture domain fact statements for which I did not impose cardinality constraints at that level. This was sufficient for my requirements.

<JS>From 1978 to 2000, the published R & D on the conceptual schema and 
related issues went far beyond what the vendors provided, Tim B-L
cited some of that work, but the DAML developers ignored it.</JS>
It is widely known that vendors will publish to whatever knowledge is widely used and can be sold to corporate IT. Few corporate IT staff can directly use the published academic wisdom in IT journals nor the pressure of project experience with strictly defined boundaries encourage such practice. The management of business-technical changes required is often so great that it is often better to manage the transition through technologies or approached which may not necessarily be pure but take the wider community along. 

Segun
07932651840
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


> Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2013 09:55:02 -0400
> From: sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx
> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Why a data model does not an ontology make
>
> Michel, Leo, and Michael,
>
> JFS
> > But what was produced [by the SW] failed to address the requirements Tim
> > proposed and many others (including Robert and me) believe are essential.
>
> MD
> > can you list/summarize the requirements and why you think the steps that
> > the semantic web effort has made do *not* contribute to those requirements?
>
> As I've said repeatedly, three words that Tim B-L emphasized in the DAML
> proposal of 2000 were diversity, heterogeneity, and interoperability.
>
> In the final DAML report of 2005, two of them (diversity and
> interoperability) were mentioned just once and heterogeneity was
> never mentioned at all.
>
> I also believe that Robert Meersman's short summary is very good:
>
> http://starlab.vub.ac.be/website/files/MeersmanBuffaloAug2007.pdf
> > Why "the" Semantic Web has failed.
> > * Data models vs. ontologies
> > * Legacy systems
> > * Scalability
> > * Methodology
>
> For point #1, RDF + SPARQL is just YADM -- Yet Another Data Model.
> It has few advantages and many disadvantages over data models that have
> been in use for decades. I have no objection to YADM if people find it
> useful, but I have serious objections to edicting any single data model
> as a requirement for the Semantic Web.
>
> For point #2, Tim B-L noted the importance of interoperability with
> legacy systems, but the DAML report ignored them completely. I can't
> blame them for not doing everything in five years, but they have not
> done *anything* to support legacy systems in the past 13 years.
>
> And please do not repeat the claim that they provided a tool to convert
> RDBs to RDF. Interoperability means that the legacy systems work with
> the new tools *concurrently* -- not by means of forced conversion.
>
> For point #3, the SW people claim that OWL is decidable. That only
> means that decisions terminate in *finite* time -- even though that
> time might be greater than the age of the universe. For anything
> the size of the WWW, scalability means no worse than (N log N) time.
>
> For point #4, please reread Robert M's slides for an example of what
> a methodology can and should support.
>
> Leo
> > The closest that relational databases get to having a semantic model
> > is the conceptual schema, which is a type of conceptual model (modeled
> > in a graphic Entity-Relation-Attribute language, with cardinality restrictions).
>
> Unfortunately, there was never a standard for a conceptual schema, and
> the vendors merely pasted the term 'conceptual schema' on top of what
> they were doing anyway. They turned it into an advertising slogan.
>
> E-R-A + cardinality is a requirement that must be specified in any
> conceptual schema (or ontology), but it's far from sufficient.
> And most of the published OWL ontologies do little or nothing
> to go beyond that level.
>
> From 1978 to 2000, the published R & D on the conceptual schema and
> related issues went far beyond what the vendors provided, Tim B-L
> cited some of that work, but the DAML developers ignored it.
>
> Leo
> > Now the above view does have rare exceptions in the database world: e.g.,
> > Matthew West's work immediately springs to mind. Similarly, HighFleet
> > (formerly Ontology Works) tries to bridge the ontology-database connection.
> > Also, of course deductive databases try to combine logic programming +
> > relational constructs, though these just focus on the implementational
> > apparatus you would need for more expressive ontologies, but say nothing
> > in particular about ontologies.
>
> I agree that the systems you mention are good. But there were many
> years of very good systems that the SW ignored. Deductive DBs were
> proposed in the 1970s -- note Planner and Microplanner. RDBs combined
> with Prolog and other AI tools have been widely used since the '80s.
> Tim B-L cited them in his DAML proposal of 2000, but the SW gnored them.
>
> By the way, two commercial companies *based* on Prolog + RDBs are
> Mathematica and Experian. Mathematica started with Prolog as their
> underlying reasoning engine in the '80s, and they have developed the
> foundation into a very rich logic-programming system that uses RDBs
> for external storage.
>
> Experian uses Prolog + RDBs for Big Data -- much bigger than any
> application that uses RDF + OWL. They compute everybody's credit
> rating on a daily basis with every imaginable input they can find.
> They use Prolog so heavily that they bought the Prologia company.
>
> MB
> > But I have to add that the transition between data model and ontology
> > is fluent. In practice, you often have to make compromises - for example to
> > enable better querying or because knowledge and application data cannot be
> > untied easily.
>
> I agree. And those issues were addressed in the 3-schema strategy of
> of the original ANSI/SPARC TR in 1978. The conceptual schema -- which
> is very close, if not identical, to what we now call formal ontology --
> was at the heart of the proposal. The physical schema, which is very
> close, if not identical to what is called the data model, specifies
> the data formats, layout, and structure. The application schema
> specifies the APIs of the software.
>
> I also agree that the detailed ontologies will often use primitives
> and operations that have a simple mapping to the preferred data model.
> That is another reason why I have recommended an underspecified upper
> level ontology with families of "microtheories" for more specialized
> ontologies that are optimized for different kinds of applications.
>
> But those issues get into details that we have discussed many
> times before, and I won't repeat them now.
>
> John
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
> Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
> To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
>

_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/  
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/  
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ 
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J    (01)

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>