Henson,
You wrote:
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 the correct data
is.
That last sentence should read, IMHO: For example
often no one is really sure what the correct data means.
That is explainable; people each have
unique viewpoints on any subject worth discussing, though they may agree in
many ways, they disagree in others. The tower of Babel isn’t really about
language, it’s about semantics. We all see it uniquely.
-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
4:25 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Making use of ontologies
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.
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)
|