Re: [ontolog-forum] Good ontologies without good tools are useless

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

+2

This is so excellent, and touches on so many things, that it is going in my personal archive, like many other posts here, but I also don't know how to respond directly in an email thread.

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 11:52 AM, henson <henson.graves@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I work with engineers who have a day job and recognize that they need ontologies to do their work. [I have a lot of experience with being in their shoes.]

The ontologies are needed to model, i.e., describe and specify systems and their operations in the real world. The models are used to design and analyze vehicles, aircraft, etc. The recognition of the need for ontology is that the operating environment descriptions need to be much more complex and are much more changeable than they were 50 years ago. The use of ontology also increasingly applies to some of the systems being built. They use ontologies to process the enormous volume of data that they ingest at operation time, and use some inference to take actions.  The software of some of these systems contains a model of the system as well as its environment which it uses at runtime for flight control and threat avoidance.

 

To be of any use the ontologies have to be imported into the development tools which they use.  The mostly UML based tools (including SysML) are now robust, ordinary engineers can and do use them to develop large complex systems. By and large these folks cannot or will not use traditional logic syntax. Also there are not commercial grade tools that have been proven in the industrial context. This doesn’t mean that these language don’t need a formal semantics, and need extensions to handle the applications that they are being used for. They do. I have been arguing for a long time that the formal methods folks should focus on retrofitting and evolving these tools, rather than attempting to develop new ones.

 

As a practical note, I believe that the SysML community is more receptive to something such as William Frank advocates than the UML community. The reason being that sociologically the engineering community has to deal with a much broader scope of applications than the UML community. If the battery fire on a commercial aircraft causes a crash then the manufacturer will certainly be sued and will be asked to produce the analysis and test results that were used to declare the aircraft safe to fly. If these results are not compelling the manufacture is in big trouble. Engineers are beginning to get this.

 

As a comment on Ron Wheeler’s comment the ontologies I see in the big data world if they deserve the name ontologies, are currently much simpler than the kind of ontologies mentioned here. However, if these systems are to be used for medical diagnosis, and drug design and analysis then they will have to have the complexity of the ones I am talking about.

 

I do not know of anywhere within a university context material relevant to this discussion is being taught. There presently doesn’t even seem to be any traditional departments willing to pick this up, in my limited experience.

 

By the way, I am passing along John’s slides to a group I am working with which is in desperate need of an upper ontology.

 

Henson

 

From: William Frank

Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2014 9:15 AM

To: [ontolog-fo The rum]

Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Good ontologies without good tools are useless

 

Yes,

UML based on a many-sorted higher order predicate calculus with Henkin semantics, and a simple upper ontology represented by the sorts  -

this is what we (Joauquin Miller, Kevin Tyson, and I) proposed for UML 2, in Clear, Clean, Concise (3C) UML

Communications of the ACM, Nov 2002, volume 45, no. 11 pages 79 - 81. 

"The Clear, Clean, Concise (3C) UML2 proposal makes the language
easier to understand and enables it to describe a broader
range of systems, from Web agents and services to entire business
communities."

This was never going to happen, at that point.  The agenda was set by Oracle and IBM, with no regard for the benefits to the long term future of systems engineering.   Also, I misunderstood people so much that instead of referencing the science, I simply explained the BENEFITS, and showed how simple it was to use this language, so I now suspect they thought this was some new off-the-wall approach invented by us three.  

I agree with all you say below, John, but add that an equally important feature integrated into a cosistent set of of UML models, along with the 4 you list, are state - transition models, the backbone, in my opinion, for precise behavior specifications.   Myself, I find UML diagrams, with my OWN simple simple common logic semantics, the most effective way to ensure a system consistency, because of all these integrated models.

 

Wm

 

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 9:11 AM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

John M, Henson, et al.,
....

Just imagine how things might have developed if Guha -- who had been
the associate director of Cyc and later the chief designer of RDF --
had adopted UML in the mid 1990s.

Guha said that the reason why he designed RDF is that CycL was too
difficult for most users.  I agree with him.  But software developers
in the 1990s were happily using UML diagrams.  The UML notations,
tools, and methodologies can support

  1. Type hierarchies (the backbone of every ontology),

  2. ER diagrams (logical signatures and cardinality constraints),

  3. Activity diagrams (links between the logic and the procedures),

  4. Controlled natural languages (more readable than OCL for stating
     rules and constraints that go beyond #1, #2, and #3).

I admit that I'm making these criticisms with 20-20 hindsight.
In fact, I blame myself even more than I blame Guha or anybody else
-- because in the mid 1990s I was participating in ISO working
groups on standards for a conceptual schema (i.e., ontology).

At that time, I was proposing logic as the foundation.  If I had
proposed UML and points #1, #2, #3, #4 defined in FOL, an ISO standard
for ontology (AKA conceptual schema) might be mainstream IT today.

John

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