A few observations about this thread as one who mostly observed the process of FIBO’s creation (i.e. I don’t have vested interest or ego):
- A lot of “ontological” time is being spend on the term “thing”, this seems unproductive. Notwithstanding discussions of the semantics of “that thingie at the top of most ontologies that corresponds to anything you can use or describe in an ontology”. To me
“Entity” seems even worse, more baggage. As this is done in OWL, “thing” seems appropriate (However I agree the definition is muddled and seems to have enraged this thread). “Thing” is ancillary to FIBO.
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FIBO had substantial contribution from several individuals who purport to be, and I think would be accepted as, professional and expert Ontologists.
So how much of this is disagreement among Ontologists, how much due to “business experts” asserting how things must be for understandability, how much due to just running out of time to do more? But anyone wanting to pursue a major ontology would be discouraged
by there being such fundamental disagreements among “the experts”.
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UML semantics has nothing to do with FIBO – Highly profiled UML was just used as a tool to express OWL. Also, UML representation is NOT required for
an OMG standard, however it makes the politics easier.
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The business content of FIBO seems useful as a grounding for the terms and concepts of the domain. It is NOT intended to directly support substantial
inference.
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The intent of FIBO as a domain focused conceptual model got entirely muddled when expressed in OWL (or this style of using OWL). I suspect better
representations would be appreciated. So, if you have a better way – take a fragment of FIBO and prove it!
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I understand your weariness, change is HARD! Show the way.
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Simon Spero
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2014 2:10 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO)
On Dec 15, 2014 12:03 PM, "Pat Hayes" <phayes@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> ...the basic definitions of terminology in those documents could not have been written by any minimally competent ontologist. They are nonsensical, as written. I have no outrage myself, only weariness, but after a decade of giving my efforts to the W3C
pro bono, I am no longer willing to contribute to the greater good by teaching basic semantics to committees of people who are ignorant of the foundations of the subject they profess to be practicing. Surely you can find *somebody* who knows the difference
between a fact and a property, or between a set and an individual? Do you have anyone in your groups who understands the technical distinctions and theory underlying ontology design?
To be fair to David Newman, he is not an executive or board member of the Enterprise Data Management Council, and does not have control over their staffing decisions. It is possible that the EDMC may have hired a trained ontologist to review and remediate
ontology quality problems, then released them when too many issues were noted.
I would also note that the OMG decided not to not take the output of the first FIBO Foundations Finalization Task Force (FTF).
The deadline for comments on the output of a second FTF has passed; I do not know if that work has been voted on yet.
The FTF 2 revised documents are here:
http://www.omgwiki.org/OMG-FDTF/doku.php
Simon