Re: [ontolog-forum] Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO)

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Dec 14, 2014 at 4:52 PM, <David.Newman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This is the first time that I am corresponding to the Ontolog-Forum, which I follow with great interest.  In my role as Chair of the FIBO effort I would like to briefly address recent comments made on this thread.

 

Hi, David

Sorry to have been so obstreperous.  My ire is really not at FIBO, but at the confusion of the foundational stuff, that as Mathew West pointed out, is really not germane to the value that might be found in FIBO. 
   

FIBO is a highly collaborative effort of the financial industry to communicate a common representation of financial constructs using RDF/OWL ontologies. 

Well, there is the thing, I think of RDF and OWL as languages in which ontologies might be expressed, and, given their paucity of logical categories, only with great difficulties, compared with what one can do with Common Logic, or with ordinary first order logic, or in a diagramnatic language like .  And, I think that OWL suffers from the same origin of ontological confusion as UML in regard to the FIBO definition of 'thing.' 

Breifly, in O-O programming languages, programmers define classes, mostly at coding time, and objects are instantiated from classes, mostly at run time.  

As metamodel for an ontology of anything except software and its execution, this is most absurd.   Whether the chicken or the egg comes first, what most definitely does *not* come first is the concept of a chicken or the *type* of thing whose instances are called 'chickens'.  I never saw the concept of a chicken instantiate a chicken, but eggs, which are very different from chickens, do in fact instantiate chickens.   
  

We know our efforts are not perfect, but they do significantly advance the state of the art in an industry that is in great need of standardization and transparency. 

Very true.
 

We are designing and pragmatically testing ontologies both for conceptual human facing benefit as well as for executable and operational purposes.  We have invested in RDF/OWL because it is more expressive than the many conventional legacy modeling techniques used in the industry to date.  We are using UML only as a means of communicating the specification developed in RDF/OWL for submission to the OMG’s standardization process, which is an OMG requirement.  We expect users of FIBO to leverage RDF/OWL not UML. 

Personally, I don't think that makes so much difference, in that whatever notation one choose to use, you don't HAVE to accept its more common metaphysical underpinnings.   Neither OWL nor UML forces people to build deep hierachies.    

It was not the notation I was objecting to, but rather the undercurrents I found in your purported definition of 'thing'.

We are also developing a rigorous methodology for quality assurance testing of the ontologies,

Well, in general quality assurance has to be preceded by quality standards.   Are there any quality standards that say definitions should not be circular?

which not only includes ontology hygiene testing, but also business use case testing.  We also understand many of the limitations of RDF/OWL in terms of expressivity.  However, we believe this is a prudent and significantly positive step forward given the technical alternatives that are available to us within the industry.

I wonder whether you considered what might be simpler alternatives like concept graphs or SKOS. 

 

If you believe that you have a better way of contributing to the greater good then please sign up for one of our working groups and suggest to the many ontologists and practitioners who are already volunteering their time and expertise on how exactly you would improve upon what has been done.  You are most welcome to channel your outrage into contribution. 

Thanks.    We should talk about this.   But, I am trying to not only be outraged, but explain why. 
 

Participation in the FIBO development process is not restricted to participants from the financial industry, but is also open to ontologists from academia and other industries.

Best,

 

David Newman

Strategic Planning Manager

Senior Vice President

Enterprise Architecture and IT Strategy

David.Newman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Office: (415) 801-8418

Cell:    (925) 788-0529

 

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From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of William Frank
Sent: Sunday, December 14, 2014 12:56 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO)

 

I wish words failed me, too.    But my outrage needs some words to go with it.

I am **most** concerned not with how egregiously AWFUL this is, but what it means about the engineering culture in which this could occur. 

There are two disfunctional characteristics that seem to me to be at play here. 

1.Standardize everything first, then use it later, if at all.   No more try before you buy.  Back in pre-history, things like SQL and C were introduced, adopted, then finally turned into standards.  Now, every time somebody has a new idea (or even, as in this case, seems to wish they were having an idea), the FIRST thing they do is to define a 'standard'.

2. Talk (or code) first, learn (or reuse) never.   This subject, as we here all love to yammer on about, has a history more than 2000 years old, about which lots has been learned.  So, the modern day experts on how to effectively stipulate what an ontology will mean by the term 'thing', as well as how to effectively construct defintions,  have a great deal of help from the shoulders on which they stand.   This so-called standard, on the other hand, is like a nightmare of jumbled words that might have popped up in the 2000 years of incremental improvement in our understanding of what is useful to cast as a 'thing', and when.

 

I am sure the roots of these patterns are economic, as are the roots of most things, but  in the past few millenia of science and engineering, there have been many celebrated endeavors motivated by the desire to increase our understanding of things.  (or maybe, our understanding of  "sets of individuals which are defined according the facts (properties) given for that kind of thing. ")

Although unnecessary, I can't help but repeat Pat's quote from the standard and attack a few of its more obvious failings.   Here is what these people sponsored by the OMG and propose as a standard for the Financial Industry:

"A Thing is defined as the set of individuals which are defined according the facts (properties) given for that kind of thing. "

Well, in general, circular definitions are undesireable. 

So, they have the concept of individual, as a primitive from which Thing is constructed. So, presumably, individuals are NOT things.

Second, they do not distinquish between facts and properties, suggesting that they will have a really hard time when it comes to dealing with the different meta types in the ontology.

The capstone of the absurdity, though, is that in defining thing, they rely on, as part of the definition of thing, the concept of 'KIND of thing.'  How are we to know what a kind of thing is, before we know what a thing is? 

Looking at this some more though, alot of the nonsense in the official semantics for the Unified Modelling Language seems to be embedded here, in that they seem to be making the same fallacy, that individuals and types are so entirely different in nature that we can't even talk about them in the same language.    Of course, the so-called 'semantics' of UML itself has the same disfunctional roots as this stuff does.   Lets make some money for our companies that make tools for O-O languages.

No wonder ontology is not more widely respected, if this is the kind of stuff that happens.


Wm

 

 

On Sun, Dec 14, 2014 at 2:17 PM, Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx> wrote:

This is hopelessly confused. The technical part of it is nonsense. Just as a sample:

"6.3.3.1 Thing
A Thing is a set theory construct. This is shown on the diagrams as a box with a name. On some diagrams, additional
textual entries in the box show the Simple Properties about that thing.
A Thing is defined as the set of individuals which are defined according the facts (properties) given for that kind of thing. "

Words fail me at this point. How is it possible for educated adult human beings to get themselves so unbelievably muddled over what should be one of the simplest ideas ever stated?

Pat

On Dec 14, 2014, at 12:40 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> A report on the FIBO project:
>
>    http://edmcouncil.org/view/reports/20141121_FIBO_Report_to_Members.pdf
>
> See below for excerpts from the FIBO Semantics Repository Home Page.
>
> John
> ___________________________
>
> Source:  http://www.edmcouncil.org/semanticsrepository/index.html
>
> This website provides a partial report of sections of the Financial
> Industry Business Ontology (FIBO). This is being submitted to the Object
> Management Group (OMG) as a set of proposed standard ontologies under
> the FIBO umbrella. These FIBO OMG specifications are optimized for
> semantic technology applications.
>
> Alongside these we are working to release the full canonical reference
> ontology (as seen in these pages) as RDF/OWL...
>
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