Sira - nicely said. (01)
At the risk of the beating the point to death, I want to throw in my two
pennies. (02)
Over the past couple of decades, every field of study has become more complex,
in part simply because the number of specialists in each field has grown as the
number of educated people has increased. This is presenting us with problem
sets that we have little experience or historical practice to fall back on --
because we haven't been here before. It's completely rational for someone who
is an expert in one area to be skeptical of inputs from another field -- the
more you know about an area the more aware you are of the subtleties and shades
of meaning required to accurately describe aspects of it. (03)
The common thread across these fields is technology -- I don't know of any area
of expertise where there is a rapidly accumulating and expanding body of
research/knowledge that is not at a minimum using email/web sites/etc., to
communicate about it. In general, it's a reasonably safe assumption that some
form of computerized data collection, experimentation, and/or analysis is
driving the evolving consensus in any given field of study. (Obviously, this
is nothing new to anyone on this list.) (04)
There are two areas where I see problems in everyday life that, at least it
seems to me, ontologies and related approaches can play a major role in helping
us collectively to make sense, and use of, the exploding increases in available
information. I'll loosely describe these as (05)
1) Cross-field fertilization and reference; and
2) Managing accumulating information stores. (06)
There are a couple of others, but I'm thinking this is already going to be too
long, so I'll leave them out for the moment. (07)
First there's (1), the case of logical solutions to similar problems that lie
across industry boundaries. These do not have to have an obvious relationship. (08)
An example from the standards world: (09)
As Mike and I mentioned in our presentation, the issue of identifiers is a
major problem for the financial services industry -- an example of a "paved
over cow path". Identifiers require both a specific, standardized methodology
for assignment and maintenance, and a governance process that creates and
encourages community adoption and reliance. I'm on a couple of ISO TC68/SC4
Working Groups (WG1 and WG8) that deal with standards for financial instruments
and business entities, respectively. I've also been around in this industry
longer than I want to admit, and have been something of a data modeling geek
for the majority of that time. I've got quite a few scars from dealing with
mixed up or inaccurate data due to identifier issues. (010)
Imagine my surprise when a friend introduced me to the gentleman responsible
for the DOI (www.doi.org) used in the publishing industry. This is a
combination of technology and governance that is used, among other things, in
digital rights management for songs distributed over the internet. Imagine my
further surprise when I spent some time digging into it and looking at how it
worked, talking with people trading derivatives and other industry
participants, and finally realized that the logical problems involved in
tracking the financial relationships among investment firms that result from
the trading of complex instruments -- these problems are very, very similar to
deciding what piece of hardware someone can use to play a song they've
purchased over the internet on. And, of course, who gets paid what. (011)
I've been talking about this with others in the industry for about a year now,
and it seems that some other folks are starting to come to the same conclusion.
(That obviously doesn't help with issues of entrenched commercial interests,
etc., but it's a start.) (012)
In line with Sira's note below, the important point here (and I apologize for
the length this is growing to) is that in order to understand the similarities
in the approaches, I had to essentially build a mental (and later an actual
paper) ontology related to the actors, roles, and processes before I could
understand the way in which the DOI (or a very similar approach) may be
specifically applicable within financial services. (013)
A methodology for comparing logical relationship arrangements among disparate
ontologies would, in my opinion, yield immense benefits. More importantly,
establishing a communal practice of learning from each other across industry
and expertise boundaries **and being able to demonstrate how this is done
(graphical tools, etc.)** will demonstrate, in a concrete manner, the value of
creating ontologies for specific areas. Enabling machine reasoning along these
lines will take "data mining" to an entirely new level. (014)
With regards to (2), above, this is what Mike and I were talking about in
reference to tools, and where we're going with our FISD Data Model Working
Group. I'll be happy to discuss this at length with anyone interested, but
have gone on too long as it is. (015)
Best, (016)
BN (017)
Bill Nichols
Program Director
Securities Processing Automation
FISD/SIIA
202.789.4480 - o
301.873.2812 - c (018)
www.fisd.net
www.mddl.org
wiki.fisd.net (019)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sirarat
Sarntivijai
Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 7:39 PM
To: Ontology Summit 2009
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] Slight amendment to Gerry's request,plus a
synopsis request (020)
Dear Joab et al., (021)
The piece is a great summarized story of the meeting. In addition to
that, I would like to raise some awareness of collaboration for
interoperability and reusability here. (022)
At the meeting, Dr. Ravi Sharma stressed on the importance of
"integration" a few times (perhaps, this should be quite an important
remark to add to the write-up). And I cannot say enough of how much I
agree with him. I think the underlying statement of this idea is,
although the ontology creation is important to answer the question of
*what* should be built using ontology technology, the challenges do
not lie in how it is built, but rather how it is going to be used. (023)
At this moment, people seek the immediate answer to building the
industrial ontology in need for the common annotations/understanding
of the data while wanting to promote the *interoperability* and
*reusability*. Therefore, ontologists should keep in mind that even
though the ontology that s/he creates will be defined to fit his/her
use, it would be of a greater benefit to think of how it is going to
be reused and interoperated as well. (024)
The title of the write-up saying "Data reuse not possible without
some ontological work" is only partially accurate, if I may say. Even
with some ontological work in place, if the community is not thinking
ahead of how this work is going to be used with other ontological
work, reusability and interoperability can be and will be very
challenging. Because ontology, in many cases, is built in a bottom-up
manner where the creator of that ontology may or may not be aware of
the ontology's power of computations for its reasoning sense. We have
talked about eight different ontologies at the meeting. The primary
use for each ontology seems to be well-defined within the individual
scope of that ontology (I only heard two examples in the Unit
Ontology and the Geospatial Ontology that would exercise this logical
reasoning ability). However, I do urge the community to start
thinking about how these ontologies are interrelated. (025)
For example, i can very well imagine the building ontology (ref:
MacPherson) reusing the geographical elements from the geospatial
ontology (ref: Lieberman) project. Another example would be the
gas&oil industry ontology (ref: West) collaborating the banking/
financial elements into its structure using the financial ontology
(ref: Nichols/Bennett), and the list goes on. (026)
It is not only the interactions within the industrial ontologies that
should be promoted, the interrelations with other seem-not-too-
related worlds are definitely there. In health care and biomedical
research, at many times what goes on with the treatment of one
patient is tracked by the device being connected to the patient, and
those devices can be defined by their physical locations. Having
building ontology defined in place with a reusable definitions can
certainly help improve the patient treatment tracking systems. (027)
At a larger scope, I also urge that the organization at a higher
level sees to the importance of this kind of collaboration. There
seems to be a disconnection between organizations that can block the
knowledge transfer among us. What we have learnt in biomedical
ontology at the NIH side from so many years of trial and error can
provide great insights to what is to do and what is not to do at NIST-
industrial ontology so we do not repeat the same mistakes elsewhere
which can cost us unnecessary time and money. (028)
I can go on and on about this and it will only get more detailed, I
should stop here but I will be more than happy to discuss this offline. (029)
Thank you for reading until this very line :)
Sira (030)
Sirarat Sarntivijai
Ph.D. Candidate, Bioinformatics
Graduate Student Research Assistant, Center for Computational
Medicine & Bioinformatics
National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics
University of Michigan (031)
siiraa@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.ccmb.med.umich.edu/
http://www.ncibi.org/ (032)
On Apr 8, 2009, at 3:44 PM, Mike Bennett wrote: (033)
> Hi Joab,
>
> Good write-up. There is a possible typo at the foot of Page 2:
>
> "And it would also reduce the number of elicit assumptions made by
> scientists that can often lead to error"
>
> Do you mean explicit or illicit? Or implicit?
>
> I didn't see anything about the financial industry work, although you
> mention it in the initial summary.
>
> Best regards,
>
>
> Mike Bennett
>
>
> Joab Jackson wrote:
>>
>> Hello!
>>
>> Joab Jackson here from Government Computer News... I've written up a
>> quick summary of the communiqué and the meeting. We posted it
>> yesterday:
>>
>> http://gcn.com/articles/2009/04/07/nist-ontology.aspx
>>
>> I've tried to capture the details as accurately as possible, but if I
>> made any mistakes, please shoot me an email and we'll get them
>> corrected.
>>
>> I know the new administration is talking quite a bit about government
>> reuse of data, so this topic is quite pertinent these days.
>>
>> Thanks again for letting me attend...
>>
>> Joab
>>
>> -----------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Joab Jackson
>>
>> Senior Editor, Technology
>>
>> Government Computer News
>>
>> 3141 Fairview Park Drive, Suite 777
>>
>> Falls Church, Va. 22042
>>
>> 1-(301)-576-9645
>>
>> http://www.gcn.com
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ---
>>
>> *From:* ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> [mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of
>> *Steve Ray
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, April 07, 2009 10:34 AM
>> *To:* Ontology Summit 2009
>> *Subject:* Re: [ontology-summit] Slight amendment to Gerry's
>> request,plus a synopsis request
>>
>> Great. Thanks, Josh.
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 6:51 AM, Lieberman Joshua
>> <jlieberman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> <mailto:jlieberman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>>
>> Here is an entry for OGC:
>>
>> Text:
>>
>> The proposed OGC project would leverage a standards ontologies
>> registry-repository to create and manage mappings between
>> discovery-level models for geospatial information and earth
>> observation resources. Some of these ontologies have been created
>> informally, some have not yet been created for relevant standards.
>> The
>> two use cases would involve first the creation / discovery /
>> management / annotation of ontology artifacts (schema and domain
>> level), and then their data-level use in federated catalogs /
>> knowledgebases for cross-community queries and broad "findability".
>> There is both a general knowledge aspect, and aspects specific to
>> geospatiotemporal observational parameters (feature of interest,
>> phenomenon, measurand, sensor process model, etc.)
>>
>> Josh Lieberman
>>
>> On Apr 6, 2009, at 9:42 PM, Steve Ray wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> In this email is a link to an excel spreadsheet that will make it
>> easier for us to assemble your responses. Please use this excel
>> spreadsheet, then email your filled in spreadsheet to Peter Yim,
>> Steve
>> Ray and Michael Gruninger. (Our emails are on this message). We will
>> then combine the results into one.
>>
>> Here's the spreadsheet link:
>> http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OntologySummit2009/
>> OntologySummit2009_Symposium_20090406-07/wip/
>> OntologySummit2009_F2F-Day-1_Project-Survey-Template_20090406b.xls
>>
>> But before you go - we also need a textual synopsis of each of the
>> nine projects, for inclusion in the communique. Could the appropriate
>> champion please send that just to Steve Ray, who is compiling that.
>>
>> See you all tomorrow!
>>
>> --
>>
>> Steven Ray
>> Phone: (202) 362-5059
>> Cell: (202) 316-6481
>> Email: steve@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:steve@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>>
>> _________________________________________________________________
>> Msg Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontology-summit/
>> Subscribe/Config:
>> http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontology-summit/
>> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontology-summit-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Community Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/
>> OntologySummit2009/
>> Community Wiki:
>> http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2009
>> Community Portal: http://ontolog.cim3.net/
>>
>>
>>
>> _________________________________________________________________
>> Msg Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontology-summit/
>> Subscribe/Config:
>> http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontology-summit/
>> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontology-summit-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> <mailto:ontology-summit-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Community Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/
>> OntologySummit2009/
>> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?
>> OntologySummit2009
>> Community Portal: http://ontolog.cim3.net/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Steven Ray
>> Phone: (202) 362-5059
>> Cell: (202) 316-6481
>> Email: steve@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:steve@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ---
>>
>>
>> _________________________________________________________________
>> Msg Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontology-summit/
>> Subscribe/Config: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/
>> ontology-summit/
>> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontology-summit-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Community Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/
>> OntologySummit2009/
>> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?
>> OntologySummit2009
>> Community Portal: http://ontolog.cim3.net/
>>
>
>
> --
> Mike Bennett
> Director
> Hypercube Ltd.
> 89 Worship Street
> London EC2A 2BF
> Tel: +44 (0) 20 7917 9522
> Mob: +44 (0) 7721 420 730
> www.hypercube.co.uk
> Registered in England and Wales No. 2461068
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Msg Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontology-summit/
> Subscribe/Config: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontology-
> summit/
> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontology-summit-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Community Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OntologySummit2009/
> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?
> OntologySummit2009
> Community Portal: http://ontolog.cim3.net/
>
> (034)
_________________________________________________________________
Msg Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontology-summit/
Subscribe/Config: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontology-summit/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontology-summit-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Community Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OntologySummit2009/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2009
Community Portal: http://ontolog.cim3.net/ (035)
_________________________________________________________________
Msg Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontology-summit/
Subscribe/Config: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontology-summit/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontology-summit-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Community Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OntologySummit2009/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2009
Community Portal: http://ontolog.cim3.net/ (036)
|