Steve,
William H. Kenworthey developed the first Federal ontology while
he was at the Pentagon. I had lunch with him 25 years ago and he
gave me a copy of it.
He is 87 and retired now; I spoke with him two weeks ago and we
discussed the progress that has been made in ontology study. He
reinforced the need for organized data for business use. I used
his comment in a presentation I made in Washington last week:
—“An
ontology
is like a Tarmac. It takes a long time to build one
and
when you’re
finished it just lays there. But if you have one,
you can
land a lot of 747’s
on it."—
- William H. Kenworthey Jr.
Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense
Management Systems, Pentagon (retired)
I could not find the document online and it is a bit outdated by
today's standards. The original; ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 14 N 492, has
been superseded by ISO/IEC TR 20943-1:2003. In particular TR
20943-6 is of interest. This document is available on the web, but
it is a preview and references the key documents ISO/IEC 11179.
https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso-iec:tr:20943:-6:ed-1:v1:en
This document is a preview. It references ISO/IEC 11179 (6 parts),
which can be found on the web at:
http://www.jtc1sc32.org/free_standards.html
There is a license agreement which you will need to approve before
you can access these documents.
Steve,
Finally, I have tracked your contributions to electronic
publishing for many years. Thank you, I greatly appreciate the
work you, Dr. Jim Mason and others have made in getting us to
where we are today. This is in spite of my opinions of the Web. It
is unfortunate that this work is path dependent, as some of the
decisions made getting here will make future work difficult.
-John Bottoms
* * * * * *
On 7/19/2015 11:55 AM, Steve Newcomb wrote:
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*.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Steve Newcomb
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