Rich,
As you say the basic ontology is often present in some form. Further in my
experience search,
evaluation, inference, question answering, discovery, and many other methods are
used on the data described by the ontology in many large industrial
applications. The problem is that these tasks are often done
almost entirely manually with very little IT support, let alone more
sophisticated processing that uses a bit of inference. There are multiple
reasons for this. For example often no one is really sure what is the correct
data is.
Henson Graves
Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2014 5:19 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Making use of
ontologies
Dear
Jim,
Yes, you got it exactly
right, from my experience. An ontology is part of every object packaged
system, even if not explicitly called such. And the semantics is, as you
say, comprised of invokable (Sp?) functions for sensing and effecting the world
the system is embedded into.
But search, evaluation,
inference, question answering, discovery, and many other methods are not
commonly practiced in applications.
Since the basic
ontology is present, it would seem useful to have tools that can start with that
and extend it to include these and other techniques. But that hasn’t been
done, to my knowledge.
-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 henson
Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2014 2:25
PM
To:
ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ontolog-forum] Making use of
ontologies
In my
experience, we and our machines use ontologies to describe and interact with the
physical world. This means that for ontologies to be useful they have to have
some accompanying physical semantics, not just a translation into some other
concepts or words, or even an axioms to describe their meaning. I am of course
strongly in favor of axiomatic semantics for ontologies. But even with axioms
there need to be procedures for constructing or recognizing if something is in a
specific category. One might call this an operational semantics. This is model
theory in the sense of logic, but it does not come for free, even when there is
an axiomatic semantics.
Taking
“if it walks like a duck, …” a bit further, a vehicle design description may use
an ontology with categories such as physical object, with specializations for
some particular kind of steel. The physical semantics is generally a procedure
to recognize or test for that kind of steel. A big problem for replacement
parts for commercial aircraft is the presence of counterfeit parts. Often these
recognition procedures, as well as procedures for performing tests and analyzing
test results, are quite complex, with their own ontologies to describe them.
However, these ontology applications are only successful when the physical
semantics can be agreed on in the community where the ontology is used.
Practically the successful use of an ontology depends on
having a well-defined explicit operational semantics. It is the operational
semantic issues that cause the tears, and litigation. This does not necessarily
mean that everyone agrees with the definition, but they understand how the
concepts are being used in a given context.
I
presume that the customer who takes possession of an oil refinery checks to see
if it has all of the equipment which the customer is expecting. I know this is
the case with other large expensive industrial products. If some regulatory
agency is faced with closing down a bank, or a food processing plant, the issue
is likely to be how do we measure the conditions which trigger action.
I am not
sure that this aspect of ontology use has gotten much attention in the recent
discussions
Henson
Graves
Sent:
Wednesday, February 19, 2014 7:23 PM
Subject: Re:
[ontolog-forum] Good ontologies
without good tools are useless
Hi Henson and all,
We are
finding similar requirements in finance, as I'm sure Mike Bennett would
echo. The ontologies that are needed to support compliance and
understanding the nature, risk and opportunities related to complex securities,
annuities, and other financial instruments are necessarily far richer and more
rigorous in their definition than what I have seen over time from a linked data
/ big data perspective (although the systems that do or will use them are quite
large and the data volume certainly qualifies as big data). The services
that are needed to support both regulators and bankers require reasoning of
various sorts, including but not limited to rule-based inference,
classification, and machine learning. Systems to support fraud detection,
anti-money laundering, insider trading detection, and many other processes have
been using rule-based reasoning for decades.
Use of UML for software
engineering has been fairly widespread in banking and insurance for many years,
and retraining information architects in those industries to use it for ontology
development (with ODM stereotypes) is not as big a leap as attempting to get
them to use Protege or other ontology tools. Another advantage is that the
UML models, which can be exported to OWL or some other rule language, are
available immediately for reuse in the software applications folks are
developing. This minimizes reinvention of the vocabulary used in
development. Use of the same ontologies in rule-based systems, again
rather than reinventing the vocabulary, also dramatically reduces error,
especially if the methodology includes analyzing the ontologies to ensure they
are logically consistent prior to reuse.
For those that are interested,
we are in the process of publishing a new version of the ODM at the OMG, which
addresses a number of deficiencies we've found in implementation over the last
several years. ODM 1.1 supports most of RDF 1.1 and provides better
support for OWL 2, although the work there is incomplete. We plan to have
a 1.2 version of the specification by sometime this summer that will fix the
remaining known problems and provide complete coverage of OWL 2. Both
specifications and related artifacts will be available from the OMG site once
they are approved by the membership. That process is largely complete for
ODM 1.1, with a couple more process steps remaining, but the spec should be
public soon. If I had to guess, I would say the 1.2 version will be
available by this fall, if not sooner. We considered waiting to publish
until we were "done", but so many changes had already been made that we really
needed a new baseline to work from.
For OMG members, the Ontology
Development Metamodel (ODM) 1.1 Revision Task Force (RTF) report, documents, and
all of the model artifacts are already available on the ODM 1.1 RTF work in
progress page. They should become public when the process hoops are
complete, possibly by sometime next month.
Members of the ODM revision
task force include some of the same folks who have been working on the SysML
specification, and who really understand the value proposition, as Henson puts
so well below. The task force also includes a couple of the major UML
vendors -- No Magic and Sparx -- and there are beta tools for both No Magic's
MagicDraw and Sparx EA available.
Best regards,
Elisa
On
2/18/2014 8:52 AM, henson 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.
Sent:
Tuesday, February 18, 2014 9:15 AM
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.
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
_________________________________________________________________
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
_________________________________________________________________ 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
_________________________________________________________________ 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)
|