I’m suggesting that the goal of
interoperability will only succeed in very simple low level ontologies, such as
Dublin Core, that people can embed into their application ontologies for
specific purpose functions, such as documenting the provenance of a document as
DC offers.
Instead of the high points on the concept
lattice being in widespread use, I think the low points (the hammer and
screwdriver and two by four used by a wide swath of people, i.e. carpenters)
are more likely.
In the history of programming, concepts
have been packaged as components. In business areas, the first packages
were the usual G/L, A/P and A/R with Inventory. Those concepts evolved as
interchangeable, though the functional variety of each package among vendors
was huge, as was the price variation.
Just in Inventory, the wide variety of
functions required by various enterprises is huge. Making subconcepts of
inventory concepts wasn’t widely accepted because of the diversity in
ways that businesses found them confusing. Each enterprise tended to use
their own traditional nomenclature for properties and actions no matter what
you do to document the intended uses. People use their own words and
phrases for such things, not the short, barely documented names and phrases
that ontologists prefer.
So I don’t expect ontology to
squeeze into the commercial space from the top, but from the bottom. As
you state below:
There is a good deal of analysis
in context such as with real data and what it means to users that goes into the
refinement for there.
The product of that analysis is realistic
contexts that actually are encountered by the production employees, and
understood by their first line bosses and above. Those contexts are where
the progress will first be made.
Having worked in Knowledge Engineering way
back when, my pet peeve was often about the use of misleading terms or
downright antonyms of the concepts I personally use to model the behavior of
systems. Language is close to thought, so using terms that the production
crew considers inconsistent or inverted does more harm than good for that crew.
It’s well known that adding people
to software projects makes the projects take longer in many cases. The
extra work energy required is in getting the various programming teams to agree
on tasks that require them to interface. The reason is because they have
to learn each other’s terminology, begin to think like the other person’s
thoughts, and use the other person’s language before all concerned can
come to a feasible integration of all the parts. I don’t see any
reason why this won’t also happen in ontology engineering, but on a
larger even more confusing scale because of the geographic separation of team
partners.
-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 Gary Berg-Cross
Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2013
1:43 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum]
"I don't believe in word senses." Sue Atkins
Personal ontologies are always possible in a Lewis Carroll
sense, but not the goal when one is pursuing some operative degree of
interoperability.
I was asking about a start on ontology development aided
by the use of extant vocabularies and definitions, not taking that definition
as an end point. There is a good deal of analysis in context such as with real
data and what it means to users that goes into the refinement for there.
SOCoP Executive Secretary
On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Gary,
The operational question is: Whose definition will be used for
which concept?
The consistent result on this email list has been that we
(presumably with an adequate understanding of ontology principles) disagree
emphatically on every ontology that has so far been discussed, with the
exception of Dublin Core.
It would seem to be a reasonable conclusion that ontologies are
personal systems of what each individual believes exists. That means that
when you put together a lot of people who “define” an ontology, you
get the usual result of a politically complicit elephant where a mouse would do
well.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
Still
would we agree that "defitional" ideas term/wordsenses as
assembled in dictionaries. glossaries and the like are useful places
to look
when trying to develop ontologies?
SOCoP
Executive Secretary
On Sat, Oct 12,
2013 at 11:44 AM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The subject line
is a quotation by the professional lexicographer
Sue Atkins. She certainly knows what she's talking about, as her
Wikipedia entry indicates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._T._S._Atkins
Adam Kilgarriff, a computational linguist, used that quotation as
the title of a widely cited paper:
http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk/Publications/1997-K-CHum-believe.pdf
From the abstract of that paper:
> Word sense disambiguation assumes word senses. Within the lexicography
> and linguistics literature, they are known to be very slippery entities.
> The paper looks at problems with existing accounts of `word sense' and
> describes the various kinds of ways in which a word's meaning can deviate
> from its core meaning. An analysis is presented in which word senses
> are abstractions from clusters of corpus citations, in accordance with
> current lexicographic practice. The corpus citations, not the word senses,
> are the basic objects in the ontology. The corpus citations will be
> clustered into senses according to the purposes of whoever or whatever
> does the clustering. In the absence of such purposes, word senses do not
exist.
I strongly agree with both Sue A. and Adam K. on those issues. I won't
say that I completely agree with either or both on everything, but the
points they make are always well informed and well worth considering.
Following are Adam's publications:
http://trac.sketchengine.co.uk/wiki/AK/Papers
Annotations can be useful for many applications. But in general, they
must always be considered approximations for some specific purpose in
the context for which they were developed. This fact has been very
well known to translators for centuries.
John
PS: Beryl Atkins adopted the name Sue because her husband couldn't
pronounce 'Beryl'.
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