RE: imagine the building ontology reusing the geographical elements - I've been
looking at "Building an Ontology for the National Map
[http://cegis.usgs.gov/ontology.html] introduced by Brand Niemann at the
conference and have a question: the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS)
Feature Class Definitions
[http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnispublic/f?p=116:8:3034623299302385] *START* to
talk about buildings but not the right way. Unfortunately "building" is defined
as " A manmade structure with walls and a roof for protection of people and
(or) materials, but not including church, hospital, or school." Churches,
hospitals and schools are defined further on but the definitions are
fundamentally wrong in a number of ways. Especially the term "church" is not
generic enough and could be downright insulting to non-Christian religions.
Please refer to OmniClass Table 11 Construction Entities by Function
[http://www.omniclass.org/tables/OmniClass_11_2006-03-28.pdf]. This table is
currently being revised and will never be "done". (01)
Obviously everyone is working to develop systems that work and are not using
incorrect terms or classes on purpose - there are memorandums of understanding
between organizations like buildingSMART, OGC and USGS, terms from GNIS could
be incorporated into the OCCS Table 11 update, the final results can be
officially transmitted to the organizations that could make use of
classification systems or terms. Or, I suggest geographic information systems
can define geographic features and just say "building" and leave it at that
regardless of what kind it is, and refer to an import from the building domain.
That way GIS would not need to keep up with BIM, integration would happen as
needed by location of each building and geographic feature as if the National
Map was one big Common Operating Picture. Likewise, buildings could reference
in more detailed and correct geographic information from the GIS world,
financial data, utility information such as oil and gas that is better
understood and maintained by others. A fully functional city would have
cohesive alignment. There will always be fuzzy areas in between the keepers of
terms and classes, for example an outdoor amphitheater is part of the built
environment but it does not have walls or a roof. Points like this could live
in both worlds if the same term is used. (02)
The question is - which has been a historically worse - duplication as Howard
Mason mentions (which is a legitimate problem and wastes time) - or incomplete
and wrong? (03)
Thank you, (04)
Deborah MacPherson
Specifications and Research (05)
Cannon Design
1100 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 2900
Arlington, Virginia 22209 (06)
T: 703.907.2300
F: 703.907.2050 (07)
-----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 (08)
Dear Joab et al., (09)
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. (010)
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. (011)
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. (012)
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. (013)
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. (014)
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. (015)
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. (016)
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. (017)
Thank you for reading until this very line :) Sira (018)
Sirarat Sarntivijai
Ph.D. Candidate, Bioinformatics
Graduate Student Research Assistant, Center for Computational Medicine &
Bioinformatics National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics
University of Michigan (019)
siiraa@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.ccmb.med.umich.edu/
http://www.ncibi.org/ (020)
On Apr 8, 2009, at 3:44 PM, Mike Bennett wrote: (021)
> 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>
>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Steven Ray
>> Phone: (202) 362-5059
>> Cell: (202) 316-6481
>> Email: steve@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:steve@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ---
>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> Mike Bennett
> Director
> Hypercube Ltd.
> 89 Worship Street
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>
>
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> (022)
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