I broadly approve of this document. In the large, it does a great job of
achieving its intended purpose. I regret not having been there. (01)
In the small... I have a few suggestions, in case it is not too late to
make changes/updates w/o starting a war :-)) (02)
It would be a very good idea to highlight at the beginning who the
intended audience is.
-- (03)
The major dimensions should be highlighted, minimaly in boldface. Now
they are hidden in a long string of paragraphs. Oddly, this is done for
the lesser dimensions, why not for the major ones?
Furthermore, section [sub]headings should highlight the different groups
of dimensions, semantic and pragmatic.
-- (04)
The findings start of with a dimension, this is odd. It also mentions
"The governance dimension, as if it has been mentioned before, which it
has not. The findings section should be introduced, not just launched
into.
-- (05)
The NUMBER of concept and relations is not even a crude measure of
generality. It is at best under limited circustances correlated with
granularity. E.g. if the scope is constant, and the coverage of the
topics in the ontology is uniform, then more granularity would require
more concepts and relations. But you can have zillions of concepts for
a huge domain and still be low granularity. You could have a smallish
domain where all but a small part is covered in little detail, with one
bit covered in great detail. The number of concepts tells you nothing.
This might be one of those things like pornography, where it may be
impossible to have a metric for testing it, but we recognize it when we
see it.
-- (06)
The examples for intended use are all over the place. Some are general,
some are highly specific. It makes more sense to try to have a lot of
coverage with general categories and maybe toss in a few examples. I
would suggest something like this to replace the portion of the current
text: (07)
"Ontologies are used for a variety of purposes. These include human to
human communication (e.g. controlled vocabularies for recording medical
diagnoses), semantic interoperability & integration among heterogeneous
databases and applications, neutral authoring, data semantics
specification for databases or data entry, improved search & question
answering, sharing and reuse. Ontologies are also used in
ontology-driven software engineering, where the ontology is the basis
for a software specification. In conjunction with automated reasoning,
this can give rise to improved reliabilty, reduced need for hardwired
code, reduced software maintenance costs and improved flexibility and
adaptability." (08)
I took out agent communication languages because it seemed too specific,
but someone might want to toss it back in somwhere.
-- (09)
I'm a little unhappy with the Prescriptive vs. Descriptive dimension.
I'm not familiar with people building ontologies to describe
contemporary semantic usage. Normally if you want to do that, you make a
glossary or controlled vocabulary or write a paper, you don't capture
that in an ontology. Now someone may prove me wrong on this, so that's
fine. But I still don't think it is common enough to have it be the
definition of descriptive as a point on a dimension opposed with
prescriptive. (010)
A simple contrast between prescriptive and descriptive is:
* you should do it this way, vs.
* I'm doing the best I can to describe what I see (but I don't care what
you do) (011)
But there are many possible reasons that "you should do it this way": (012)
1. you should do it this way because it is THE scientifically and
philosophically correct way to model reality
2. you should do it this way because on balance, taking into account
many different tradoffs among the various equally reasonable 'right
ways' to model reality, this is the best one.
3. you should choose this particular 'right way' if you need to use your
ontology to do X, but you should use that particular 'right way' if you
need to use your ontology do to Y.
Or maybe even:
4. You should do it this way because it is the one 'right way' to
characterize the current contemporary semantic usage in this given
domain.
5. etc. (013)
I think the more important distinction that is missed here is:
"engineered for a purpose" vs. "being at attempt to model reality".
The first is 3. above, the second is 1 above. (014)
So here is a possible alternative. (015)
Have a normative/description dimension, but keep it simple as above. (016)
Add a new "to model reality" vs. "engineered for purpose" dimension. The
difference is in what is the held up as the test for whether the
ontology is 'good'. In one case, it is an accurate reflection of
reality. In the other, it is whether it meets the intended purpose. It
is kind of a meta-purpose of the ontology (compared to the intended
purpose dimension) (017)
This falls a bit short of a complete counterproposal, but hopefuly not
by too much.
-- (018)
If it is too late for changes, then I just wasted an hour or so...
And anyway, it's too late to stay up any longer. (019)
Michael (020)
==========================
Michael Uschold
M&CT, Phantom Works
425 373-2845
michael.f.uschold@xxxxxxxxxx
========================== (021)
----------------------------------------------------
COOL TIP: to skip the phone menu tree and get a human on the phone, go
to: http://gethuman.com/tips.html (022)
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Yim [mailto:peter.yim@xxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 7:56 PM
To: Ontology Summit 2007 Forum
Subject: [ontology-summit] OntologySummit2007 has been a great success!
...Please endorse the Communique (023)
I am most excited to report that we had a REALLY successful 2-days of
workshops and Symposium. (024)
Members of the organizing committee would like to express their
heartfelt "thank you" to everyone who contributed to the 3-months'
virtual discourse and the two days of face-to-face meetings. (... My
personal apologies on some of the glitches that remote audience had
experienced during the last 2-days.) (025)
One of our major deliverables is our Communique, which you can find
at:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2007_Communique (026)
We need your endorsement to this Communique. Kindly review the document
and confirm that by e-mail to me (at <peter.yim@xxxxxxxx>, off-line, if
you agree with the content and haven't already done so) on/before April
30, 2007, so we go into history with your name on the list of people who
are endorsing the "Ontology Summit 2007 Communique". (027)
Thanks & regards. =ppy (028)
P.S. proceedings of the 2-days' face-to-face meetings can be found at: (029)
o 2007.04.23 Monday am (EDT) - Session-1:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2007_Framework_Ses
sion (030)
o 2007.04.23 Monday pm (EDT) - Session-2:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2007_Population_Se
ssion (031)
o 2007.04.24 Tuesday am (EDT) - Session-3:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2007_Communique_Se
ssion (032)
o 2007.04.24 Tuesday pm (EDT) - Session-4:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2007_Symposium
("The Summit Meeting" proper) (033)
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