All,
I have worked with a number of statisticians and psychometricans
on projects that involved ethics questions. The focus of their
discussions generally focuses on protecting identities. They have
a well developed framework for ethics and often work with SME's
for subject matter expertise.
Their statement of ethics can be found at:
http://www.amstat.org/about/ethicalguidelines.cfm
-John Bottoms
FirstStar Systems
Concord, MA USA
On 3/12/2015 6:33 PM, Duane Nickull wrote:
All,
The recent post "Become the OntologySME" and the story
mentioned therein was interesting, and touches on a
question I've had for a while.
If anyone can give their thoughts, thank you.
Q1: Are there any sources that discuss the role of
SMEs in ontology development?
I have encountered a few of these. I cannot
publish any of them here without permission though. Generally,
the need is for experience over qualifications as I am not aware
of any set of formal qualifications. There are various courses
in Ontology available at numerous institutions however no one of
them seems to be authoritative.
Most of the statements I have seen seem to indicate
“XX years of experience in domain ontology work” or
some other close terms.
Q2: If a domain ontology, say of some medical of
biological subject, does not have one or more practicing
SMEs, do you consider that to be a problem?
(I do)
DN: Absolutely. I did some recent work at the
US DOE and the Ontology aspects were very important. I would
aver that without domain knowledge, it will most likely be
incomplete or at worst, a failure due to omissions, wrongly
typed terms and errors. Abolutely essential.
Q3: To what degree do you believe non-SME ontology
developers negatively have or do affect the representations
of the domain, either via (a) (un)intentionally trying to
represent domain content/entities/phenomena using their own
metaphysical world view or that of a particular stripe in
philosophy despite it clashing with domain science, or (b)
limited understanding of the domain affecting the
faithfullness/accuracy of the representation and models?
DN: I usually use a test on whether someone
can determine the differences between abstract and concrete as a
rough estimate of their modelling prowess. If someone cannot
build an abstract metamodel, I consider ay ontology work they do
as likely dangerous if represented as ontology work. I have seen
many “models” and “metamodels” that are almost complete garbage.
The issue is that the general populace does not often have the
skills required to ascertain the degree of errors in such
models.
I would mention the OSI stack as an example.
The OSI stack is an abstract model however I have been in more
than one presentation where someone had two instances of the OSI
model apparently connecting to and communicating with one
another. When I was part of the team that built the OASIS
Reference model for SOA, we had numerous “contributions” that
were not abstract. For people able to take criticism, it is
fairly easy to help them understand how their models needed to
be changed to better represent the concepts. Unfortunately, my
observation is that most people are not that accepting of
criticism of their work, mores when it has been submitted
publicly to a team or working group.
The people who run around and deliver such
models telling everyone they are doing ontology work is damaging
to the real craft. Once more, there are no real clearly
authoritative defences or badges a person can earn that are
accepted across the entire industry as proof of mastery of
modelling as a discipline. This causes damage.
More damage is also done by people who claim
they are doing the work when they are in fact not doing it
properly.
To fix this, an industry-wide accepted
certification and accompanying tests in the various disciplines
required to do proper modelling and domain ontology modelling
would be helpful in instilling confidence in the minds of those
who need to know a person does possess the proper skills.
Perhaps that is something this body could one
day provide to the industry? I would certainly back it.
Duane
Nickull – CTO
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