Re: [ontolog-forum] is-part-of: a really, really, bad practice?

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 2:04 PM, Ron Wheeler <rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 31/05/2013 1:31 PM, William Frank wrote:

....

RW
Can one actually construct a "wine ontology" that will be equally meaningful in both contexts? And equally convenient to build and maintain?

WF

*As I believe and understand several others to believe, one wants to specify a generic, way underspecified wine ontology that needs to be extended in different ways to suit the needs of particular domains of endeavor, such as the two excellently different ones you introduce.  With, among its goals, the ability to related the different domains to each others.

 RW

I look forward to see how this evolves.
I would be delighted to find that my misgivings are misplaced and that there is a way to define something that is both true and useful in a wide range of use cases.

WF

Well, a high level, highly underspecified ontology is not useful ***in itself**.  It is a framework to start from, and extend in different directions in different domains. 

As an extreme example, consider arithmetic, which is both true and useful in a VERY wide range of use cases.  

For the trader and the back office, for the depository, for the regulator and the investor, for the issuer and his investment bank, a 'security' has quite different most important properties.  (And, I have noticed, they frequently  dismiss as unimportant the properties that are not important **to them**).  Yet, a careful analysis can capture a generic model of what a security is most essentially, then specialized along different dimensions to capture what is important to different stakeholders, with different concerns.

Consider marriage.   People in different cultures have very different mores involving marriage.  And yet, the seem to have a way of identifying that they are all talking about the same thing: marriage, (while generally disapproving of the practices that are different from their own.)  So, a domain ontology for human kinship, that underspecified marriage, but captures what is common, to all these practices, and then adding the details for specific cases, and more details for the different kinds of things, that, as in your example, different stakeholders might want to know about marriage, even in the same culture.  There are some sticky points with this, such as the fact that many concepts drift so that at one end, there is nothing in common with another use at the other end of the drift, even though they are tied together, one use to the next (called family resemblance, when contemporaneous uses.  But by and large, this provides a good working approach.)   

Wm
 

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William Frank

413/376-8167


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