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Re: [ontology-summit] [Quality] What means

To: "'Ontology Summit 2008'" <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <phismith@xxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Bargmeyer" <bebargmeyer@xxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:00:25 -0700
Message-id: <01e401c88aff$b7c76210$27562630$@gov>

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

 

----Sent by--------------------------

Bruce Bargmeyer

University of California, Berkeley

and

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

1 Cyclotron Road, MS 50B-3238

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Tel: +1 510-495-2905

Fax: +1 510-486-4004

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.

 

Pat

 

BS



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