Re: [ontolog-forum] STANDARD ONTOLOGY: USECS: The Catalog of World Entit

[Azamat Abdoullaev <ontopaedia@xxxxxxxxx>]

"A single ontology of everything vs small and specific ontologies are not the only two choices. There’s a large community who are in the middle.

"I’m unaware of any industry or enterprise interested in funding a single knowledge base about everything, so we agree about that."

There is one reason why big companies unwilling funding a Global Knowledge Base: it is to disrupt information monopolies on the internet.

We live in an information economy, where the big companies with the biggest databases are moguls. Most of the major sectors today are controlled by one dominant company. Google, search; Facebook, social networking; eBay, auctions; Apple, online content delivery; Amazon, retail; Facebook, billion users, Netflix, internet streaming media, etc.

Google will never allow you to replace its search engine with the intelligent ones:

http://www.slideshare.net/ashabook/intelligent-search-engine-gess-smart-web-x0-50747299

What we’re seeing is a cutthroat, expensive race for Data, Information and Knowledge, with a shrinking number of experts who able to analyze massive data sets as Big Data streams..

But all things change, being subject to creative destruction.

Today’s internet monopolies remind me the monopolies of the 20^th century, like AT&T, the Hollywood studios, NBC, etc.

Again, today’s information monopolies will be reshaped, replaced or destroyed by disruptive technologies and new market forces.

Azamat 

http://www.slideshare.net/ashabook/universal-standard-entity-classification-system-usecs

http://www.slideshare.net/ashabook/usecs-ads

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 7:02 PM, David Price <dprice@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 21 Jul 2015, at 15:32, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 7/20/2015 3:37 PM, Azamat Abdoullaev wrote:
>> Special thanks must be given to John Sowa for his strong commitment
>> to the cause.
>
> Thanks for the recognition.  As I said, I have been impressed the by
> work you have done on this project.  But I have also said that there
> are very serious questions about the possibility of having a standard
> ontology of any kind.
>
> From "Crystallizing theories out of knowledge soup", published in 1990,
> http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/crystal.htm
>
>> The goal of a single ontology that encompasses all of knowledge is
>> unattainable. When multiple domains are combined, either the result
>> is inconsistent because the terms have different definitions in
>> different domains, or the terms are so vaguely defined that it
>> is impossible to reach specific conclusions about anything.

There are many domains where terms are very well-defined, specifically many engineering disciplines exhibit that characteristic … if not planes would be falling from the sky every day.

>>
>> Instead of having a single consistent knowledge base about everything,
>> it is better to construct small knowledge bases for specific problems.


A single ontology of everything vs small and specific ontologies are not the only two choices. There’s a large community who are in the middle.

I’m unaware of any industry or enterprise interested in funding a single knowledge base about everything, so we agree about that.

However, my experience is that lots of independent small knowledge bases is not the answer as it is incredibly wasteful in the longer term. This is what I was trying to explain to Ed B. My experience is seeing enterprises waste a lot of money doing ontology work because they are like Wall Street-driven CEOs only thinking about the short term when they should have a much longer term vision. They end up re-modeling/mapping the same domain numerous times to get any integration/interoperability  across lines of business or disciplines because they’ve not provided any modelers with useful guidance. The idea of everyone in an industry or enterprise using the same framework/approach links up nicely with the certified accountancy guidelines analogy thread that appeared in the last week or two.

My argument is that there are disciplines and perhaps entire industries where agreeing the best framework/approach is completely feasible and saves money if followed. Think continents of agreement rather than islands of isolation.

>> The raw material for constructing those knowledge bases would be a
>> primordial knowledge soup that would contain everything, but in a
>> hopelessly inconsistent form.
>
> That brief summary is just as true today as it was in 1990.  A lot has
> happened since then, but all the new developments have confirmed that
> observation.

Certainly *not* all! We have an Oil and Gas industry consortium as a customer (EPIM) who has a long term vision of a suite if pre-integrated knowledge bases using ISO 15926 as the framework. 15926 makes 4-dimensionalism as its metaphysical commitment and all modelers using the framework follow that approach. It does not solve every problem, but it is far a better investment for them than completely independent ontology development which would mean re-modeling everything in the knowledge base every time a new domain was added to the scope.

I will note that this long term visions is about "lifecycle data integration”, “data interchange" and does not typically require complex AI algorithms or have strong requirements for reasoning. The 15926 approach does mean higher up-front costs and more verbose databases, but the theory is that it saves money over the decades that Oil and Gas platforms are in operation, for example. As part of these projects, we also proposed some 15926-as-OWL simplifications that have morphed into a profile of 15926 in OWL is which are about to begin making their way through the ISO ballot process.

> For more recent updates on those issues, see
>
> From 2006, "The challenge of knowledge soup":
> http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/challenge.pdf
>
> From 2014, "Why has AI failed?  And how can it succeed?":
> http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/micai.pdf
>
> I'll grant that having resources such as lexicons and encyclopedias
> can be helpful in providing a road map of connections and pathways
> through the knowledge soup.  But all such systems have to be living
> and growing systems -- preferably by automated or semi-automated means.
>
> You can standardize terminology, but in every branch of science,
> technology, business, and the arts, the definitions of those terms
> and the theories about them are always in constant flux.

They are not all in constant flux. As I said, if that were true planes would be falling from the sky every day. The experience with engineering tools is that once embedded in a large enterprise (e.g. Boeing for planes) they do not change significantly for 5+ years for many reasons (E.g. they cannot afford to re-train 5000 engineers very often). Another example is that enterprises with data interoperability requirements down a supply change cannot allow constant flux, and so they make national, industry or ISO standard data models (and now ontologies) to support that industry scenario.

I’m not trying to promote ISO 15926 itself, but just promoting the idea that at least some disciplines and industries are much better behaved that John’s comments lead you to believe and that having an enforced framework/approach for ontology development in and across enterprises is beneficial. So, IMO it’s not the whole universe or small isolated islands - it’s continents that should be the objective.

Cheers,
David

>
> At IBM, there was a very useful term 'functionally stabilized', which
> meant "obsolete system" for which no updates or revisions will be made.
>
> John
>
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