Folks,
Here are some thoughts on this topic. I’d like to add a
concern about the control/acceptance of ontology content by a broader group
than philosophers or scientists. I’m thinking about bureaucrats. I think
that many ontologies (and more broadly, concept systems including thesauri,
taxonomies, etc.) have been and will be developed for use within the mission
areas of government agencies. There can be a vetting process to
“approve” a concept system/ontology for use within a community of
interest.
One view of bureaucracies is that they are feudal, with fiefdoms
and the like. Ontology/concept system development is likely to occur at the
sub-organization level, rather than at an agency-wide level. In the area of the
environment, the Baron(ess) of Solid Waste will put his/her imprimatur on
the Solid Waste ontology. The Prince(ss) of Sewage will put his/her imprimatur
on the Sewage ontology. Mostly, this will not be done by fiat, but by the usual
tumult of consensus building within the communities of interest: the Solid
Waste and Sewage stakeholders. (The stakeholders may include persons who are
scientists and philosophers, and/or bureaucrats, issue activists, members of
the “regulated” community, etc.)
At some point the stakeholders will declare the concept
system/ontology to be “good enough for government work” and the
Baron(ess)/Prince(ss) will impress his/her seal into the wax.
This is some of what we need to record in an Open Ontology
Repository. Who approves the concept system/ontology for what community of
interest and what purpose? This, of course, leads to a lot of detail. There
will be evolution of content and evolution of levels of approval. There will be
changes of Political Administration, which may up the down. And there needs to
be ways to integrate the ontology fragments into larger bits for cross program
(cross media—Solid Waste, Sewage …) studies, policy, and action.
This may involve additional levels of vetting. The OOR should not only register
and hold the concept systems/ontologies, but also deal with the metadata
describing them.
Well, that lowered the level.
Bruce Bargmeyer
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Bruce Bargmeyer
University of California,
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and
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email: bebargmeyer@xxxxxxx
From:
ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Pat Hayes
Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2008 9:57 AM
To: phismith@xxxxxxxxxxx; Ontology Summit 2008
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] [Quality] What means
At 9:03 AM -0400 3/20/08, <phismith@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Thu Mar 20 2:34 , "John F. Sowa"
sent:
>For any product, including an ontology, the best recommendations are
>the reviews and reports from users that are recorded in the metadata.
>As the reviews accumulate, prospective users can decide for themselves
>which ontologies are best suited for their purpose(s).
I think democratic ranking (the wisdom of crowds) is indeed valuable for
refrigerators and other similar products. Hence the success of ranking systems
on
eBay and amazon.com. But it is surely of less importance in scientific contexts
-- we would not decide on which interpretation of the equations of quantum
physics to accept by taking a vote of users. Since the OBO Foundry ontologies
are
built by scientists, to support scientific research, it is not clear that they
are to be treated as products.
This is where I part company with Barry, and indeed where I
believe that the very idea of controlling the contents of an OOR (noting that
the first O means 'open') needs to be examined very, very carefully. Of course
we would not argue that majority voting should be used to choose scientific
theories; but ontologies, even those used by scientists, are not themselves
scientific theories. The OBO Foundry is quite clear, in its own
documentation, that the basic ontological assumptions on which it is based are
ultimately philosophical decisions, not scientific ones. Such
assumptions most emphatically do not have the force of a scientific theory,
even when the ontologies constructed according to them are being used by
scientists. And any such implication of 'scientific' authority must be examined
especially carefully when the, er, foundry is controlled by the philosophers
themselves, and its gatekeepers are mandated to only allow ontologies which
conform to the somewhat arbitrary philosophical views of its founders (for
example, by requiring consistency with a single 'base' ontology). I do not mean
this to be a criticism of OBO itself, but I do claim that OBO hardly qualifies
as anything like an "open" ontology repository. In the contrary, in
fact: it is quite firmly closed to an entire approach to ontology construction
which, while successfully deployed elsewhere, happens to not conform to the
philosophical views that Barry has so nobly defended in so many publications.
While refrigerator manufacturers may allow
democratic ranking to influence e.g. size and color, they would use other
strategies e.g. in matters of thermodynamics.
Perhaps so: but we are here discussing matters of ontology,
and in the current state of the art, this may have more in common with consumer
product choice than with thermodynamics.
BS
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