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Re: [ontology-summit] ...Please endorse the Communique

To: "Ontology Summit 2007 Forum" <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Uschold, Michael F" <michael.f.uschold@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 11:33:02 -0700
Message-id: <4301AFA5A72736428DA388B73676A38103577A1C@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
I strongly endorse the idea of having a new version with recent comments done 
sooner rather than later.  It was done with a lot of thought and discusion, but 
ultimately it was a hurry job to get it done in the two days.     (01)

Standing back to tidy up a few rough edges will make us look better and better 
serve our goals.    (02)

Mike    (03)



==========================
Michael Uschold
M&CT, Phantom Works 
425 373-2845
michael.f.uschold@xxxxxxxxxx  
==========================    (04)

----------------------------------------------------
COOL TIP: to skip the phone menu tree and get a human on the phone, go to: 
http://gethuman.com/tips.html     (05)



-----Original Message-----
From: Peter F Brown [mailto:peter@xxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 11:30 AM
To: Ontology Summit 2007 Forum
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] ...Please endorse the Communique    (06)

Peter:
There are inevitably going to be some suggested edits that come as a result of 
standing back a bit after the event ("distance lends clarity to the view"). I 
entered some reservations regarding the text mainly so that we *didn't* descend 
into a full-blown editing process in the short time we had: otherwise we would 
still be on paragraph one or two.    (07)

I would endorse Tom Gruber's and a few others' comment that we should consider 
this as a first best effort but then I think we need to answer five important 
questions:
- to whom is the communiqué intended to be addressed?
- until when do we give everyone the opportunity to submitting proposals for 
textual changes (a deadline)?
- how long do we give a redactional team to integrate afap the remarks received?
- when do we open and close a further round of endorsement of the (possibly) 
revised text?
- how do we intend promoting the final result to the target audience?    (08)

Best regards, and sincere thanks to Frank and Olivier for coordinating all this 
so far    (09)

Peter    (010)

-----Original Message-----
From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Peter Yim
Sent: 26 April 2007 20:00
To: Ontology Summit 2007 Forum
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] ...Please endorse the Communique    (011)

Michael, ... this also goes to Barry Smith and Deborah MacPherson who sent me 
their suggested edits offline ... et al,    (012)

Re: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2007_Communique    (013)

Thank you for the suggestions and the time and effort you put into it.    (014)

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.    (015)

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.    (016)

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.    (017)

... Hope this is ok with you.    (018)

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.)    (019)

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.    (020)

Thanks & regards.  =ppy
--    (021)


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_S
> es
> 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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