Michael, ... this also goes to Barry Smith and Deborah MacPherson who
sent me their suggested edits offline ... et al, (01)
Re: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2007_Communique (02)
Thank you for the suggestions and the time and effort you put into it. (03)
The version of the communique (v1.0.0 / 2007.04.24) was supposed to be
'frozen' after its review, collaborative editing and wordsmithing
exercise at the "Communique session" on Apr-24 morning, before it was adopted
at the Summit Symposium (Apr-24 afternoon) by those at the Ontoogy
Summit 2007 Symposium session. I agree with Michael, I wished these
were brought up at the session and went into the discussion leading up
to Communique v1.0.0 adoption. (04)
As such, any further/substantive edits (other than typos and
formatting like boldface highlight etc. ... which I will work on) will
have to wait until a 'next version' (which did mention as being a
possibility during the discussion yesterday) is opened up for review,
edit, adoption through a similar community process. (05)
I shall pass all received suggestions (if you haven't aleady posted
them publicly) to the Communique Session co-chairs, Olivier
Bodenreider and Frank Olken, and will defer to them to recommend the
're-openning' of a follow-on discussion to generate a "next version"
of the communique. (06)
... Hope this is ok with you. (07)
My outstanding task is to collect all the names of people who would
endorse v1.0.0 by Apr-30 and then add that onto the document (as an
integral part of the release.) (08)
With that, may we still have your endorsement to this currently
adopted version (v1.0.0) of the communique? ... I look forward to all
your positive responses. (09)
Thanks & regards. =ppy
-- (010)
On 4/26/07, Uschold, Michael F <michael.f.uschold@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> In the small... I have a few suggestions, in case it is not too late to
> make changes/updates w/o starting a war :-))
>
> It would be a very good idea to highlight at the beginning who the
> intended audience is.
> --
>
> 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.
> --
>
> 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.
> --
>
> 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.
> --
>
> 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:
>
> "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."
>
> I took out agent communication languages because it seemed too specific,
> but someone might want to toss it back in somwhere.
> --
>
> 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.
>
> 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)
>
> But there are many possible reasons that "you should do it this way":
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> So here is a possible alternative.
>
> Have a normative/description dimension, but keep it simple as above.
>
> 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)
>
>
> This falls a bit short of a complete counterproposal, but hopefuly not
> by too much.
> --
>
>
> 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.
>
> Michael
>
>
> ==========================
> Michael Uschold
> M&CT, Phantom Works
> 425 373-2845
> michael.f.uschold@xxxxxxxxxx
> ==========================
>
> ----------------------------------------------------
> COOL TIP: to skip the phone menu tree and get a human on the phone, go
> to: http://gethuman.com/tips.html
>
>
>
> -----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
>
> I am most excited to report that we had a REALLY successful 2-days of
> workshops and Symposium.
>
> 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.)
>
> One of our major deliverables is our Communique, which you can find
> at:
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2007_Communique
>
> 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".
>
> Thanks & regards. =ppy
>
> P.S. proceedings of the 2-days' face-to-face meetings can be found at:
>
> o 2007.04.23 Monday am (EDT) - Session-1:
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2007_Framework_Ses
> sion
>
> o 2007.04.23 Monday pm (EDT) - Session-2:
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2007_Population_Se
> ssion
>
> o 2007.04.24 Tuesday am (EDT) - Session-3:
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2007_Communique_Se
> ssion
>
> o 2007.04.24 Tuesday pm (EDT) - Session-4:
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2007_Symposium
> ("The Summit Meeting" proper)
>
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