Steve, (01)
I agree wholeheartedly with the first half of this. Of all the fields of
endeavor that I have encountered, software engineering is one of the least
"professional". There is no reliable professional certification, and the
engineering companies make no warranty for their products and take no
responsibility for their failures. There are a number of certifications, but
they seem to be relatively narrow in their scope, and focused more on the
terminology of specific technologies than on reliable use. (02)
OTOH, whenever a new technology becomes a practicable engineering mechanism,
it takes 20+ years for it to become a well-specified element of a professional
discipline. It required several architects and engineers to have carefully
designed and built suspension bridges and 10+ years experience with their use
to convince the body of engineers that it was not a crackpot idea. One of the
problems with "ontology development" is that its value as an engineering tool
has only come into existence with a relatively recent improvement in the
computational hardware (c. 2000). The science for this has developed over
centuries, but the engineering practice itself has not really been feasible
(Cyc notwithstanding) until the last 20 years, and the first set of
well-defined practices (e.g. OWL) were stabilized around 2000. So we are still
in the area of learning how to engineer systems based on this technology, so
that we can define "best practice". (03)
(Conversely, we could have defined "best practice" for a lot of software
engineering in 1980, and again in the early 1990s, and we repeatedly chose the
"black art" view and fads and silver bullets instead.) (04)
-Ed (05)
Edward J. Barkmeyer
Thematix Partners
Email: ebarkmeyer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Phone: +1 240-672-5800 (06)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steve Newcomb
Sent: Sunday, July 19, 2015 11:56 AM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ontolog-forum] What is ontological malpractice? (Was: Re: More by and
about Turing) (07)
On 07/19/2015 07:33 AM, John F Sowa wrote:
> In *every* branch of science, engineering, medicine, law, etc., the
> work by professionals in that field is the *gold standard*. (08)
At the risk of generating more heat than light, I wish to point out that in
every branch of information technology, there is vacuum where there should be
something resembling the accounting industry's "Generally Accepted Accounting
Practices" and certifications, or the many non-proprietary certifications for
practitioners in the healthcare field, or the licensure processes required by
many states to practice medicine, law, and engineering. (09)
In the context of all this public-interest vacuum, it is not hard to explain
the parlous state of the security of critical IT infrastructure, or the general
engineering uproar we call the "World Wide Web", or the absurdity of
consequential government webservers that won't accept any "secure" protocol
other than one known to be insecure (TLS 1.0), not to mention the other
craziness that all of us know, and that each of us may know. (010)
In cases perhaps dearer to the hearts of readers of this mailing list, the lack
of accountability for IT "professionals" can also explain the lack of economic
and technical infrastructure whereby experts in multiple universes of discourse
can work as tour guides and bridge-builders among them. (011)
Turning now to my favorite hobby horse: It is not enough to know how to build
bridges between universes of discourse, or how to anchor the endpoints of such
bridges on solid ontological foundations. It is also necessary to build many,
many instances of bridges, and to maintain them (when possible) across the
ontological equivalent of hurricanes, earthquakes, and all other kinds of
change. That would entail creating the economic foundations of
bridge-building, bridge-maintaining, and bridge-anchoring enterprises. Such a
knowledge-ecosystem would reward those whose opinions about what's what are
measurably and publicly the most reliable for the most cases. (012)
Individual multi-domain experts would, in fact, be playing fiduciary roles.
Such a scenario requires that a definition of malpractice be defined and
maintained, so that the finger of blame can be pointed consequentially,
whenever things go awry in some consequential fashion.
It is up to ontologists to figure out how to make that meaningfully possible.
Nobody else has a prayer of doing it, and it's hard for me to imagine a more
worthwhile endeavor. It's also, obviously, a major project with major risks,
and one that would be disruptive whether or not it succeeded. Not for the
faint of heart! (013)
Steve Newcomb (014)
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