For what it’s worth in this discussion, I did an exercise several months back to see what would be required to use the COSMO foundation ontology as a top level for the FIBO ontology, and, more generally, to determine how much effort would be required to use the COSMO as a top level for domain-specific ontologies generally, as a support for semantic interoperability. I used the OWL versions of the FIBO modules that I could find at that time, and made an integrated version of that – having to tweak the headers to make it look like one ontology, then extracted from the full COSMO (http://micra.com/COSMO/COSMO.owl) those entities needed as the higher-level elements of COSMO that would allow relating FIBO elements to other things in the world. I did cheat on one point: I removed the parent relation from “Person” to “Animal” to avoid having to include all those classes and relations needed to understand what an “Animal” is, and which were not used in the FIBO modules (at that time; of course they can be added in very simply when needed). Otherwise, it went fairly smoothly, though I didn’t try too hard to make an integrated hierarchy of relations – that would require knowing the logical inferences implied by the relations, which I could only guess at. The exercise took about a week. The result (http://micra.com/COSMO/FIBO/FIBOwCOSMOs.owl) can be viewed perspicuously in OWL 4.3. The merged FIBO modules had 158 classes and 110 object properties, the FIBO-COSMO merged ontology had 657 classes and 268 object properties. Since the full COSMO has about 8000 classes and 976 object properties (at this point) I am encouraged to think that integration of multiple ontologies would be quite feasible without exploding the size of the foundation ontology used for integration. Most of those additional 500 classes from COSMO would probably be used for a top level in many other domain ontologies. Lots more work needs doing. I have been in touch in the past with Mike Bennet, but never got into details about this experiment. I have moved on to other things, but can still spend some time on this if there is some actual application that can provide a realistic test of the utility of the FIBO ontology. As to how one should document an ontology, my own view is that a top-level ontology that includes primitives (and is not used only in one specific application, but used for interoperability among independently developed ontologies) requires good comprehensive text documentation of the elements that describes clearly the intended meaning, to serve as a substitute for the “procedural semantics” that could be derived from standardized sensor and robotics procedures that could provide automated grounding of meaning. Until such standard procedural calls are developed, users will have to read the documentation to determine what each term means, and decide how that fits into their local applications and what local terms have the same or related meaning. Some of the COSMO elements have rather large documentation. Maybe excessive, but one wants to avoid any unnecessary ambiguity. Pat Patrick Cassidy MICRA Inc. cassidy@xxxxxxxxx 1-908-561-3416 From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David.Newman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, December 14, 2014 4:53 PM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) 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. FIBO is a highly collaborative effort of the financial industry to communicate a common representation of financial constructs using RDF/OWL ontologies. 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. 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. We are also developing a rigorous methodology for quality assurance testing of the ontologies, 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. 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. 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 This message may contain confidential and/or privileged information. If you are not the addressee or authorized to receive this for the addressee, you must not use, copy, disclose, or take any action based on this message or any information herein. If you have received this message in error, please advise the sender immediately by reply e-mail and delete this message. Thank you for your cooperation. 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 ------------------------------------------------------------
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