I fully agree with what Sira, Bill and Howard have said here. I made the
point in reference to my work, that what is important is not what we
have in the financial world, but how much we needed to draw on other
worlds in order to find the common semantic building blocks from which
financial securities are made up. I rejected the "Pizza approach" in
which "Pizza is a thing, Base if a Thing, Topping is a Thing", in
preference for a model in which everything in the ontology has a full
meaningful taxonomic ancestry. So for example a share is a kind of
transferable contract which is a kind of contract, and the equity which
the holder holds has its place in the terms defined in accounting
(Assets, Liabilities, Owners' Equity). (01)
In order to provide the language of terms from which to specialise the
definitions in the financial securities world, I needed to draw upon
more general terms in mathematics, geopolitical, time, legal, business
(transactions, parties etc.), accounting and risk, as well as needing to
define a partition of "Occurrent" things for Event, Activity, Process
(based on the DOI work Bill mentions and some conversations with Bill). (02)
These are all things where I would expect or hope to find a suitable
existing standard set of terms, either as ontology or as established
data standards that could be reverse engineered into ontology terms. The
only obvious one I could use was XBRL for accounting, and there is also
Bill McCarthy's work on economic transactions which I intend to realign
with. For the others, anyone wanting to build an ontology in a
disciplined way will encounter the same questions I had about which and
what to use. (03)
Whether or not one can expect a single integrated view of the world out
of the existing standards in these areas (and others for buildings,
medical etc.), I would say that if anyone who can provide industry
leadership on which standards are well defined and how they can be
mutually referred to, this would be of enormous benefit to people
creating new ontologies in industry verticals. One reason I did not make
much reference to open Cyc in my work is that I think industry vertical
terms should only be defined once they have identified reusable
semantics from existing industry standard terms in such a "mid level"
ontology. (04)
I also found it logical to link these mid level terms (Contract,
Account, Activity etc.) to the three layers of John Sowa's KR ontology
(independent/relative/mediating; continuant/occurrent;
concrete/abstract), which is something most existing ontologies don't
do. I would submit that it would be logical when reverse engineering
well established industry standard terms in this mid-level space, to
link these to the KR lattice terms above. That would also aid in
interoperability of these terms I think. (05)
Anyway, I took an action to try to identify what terms in for example
the legal world would be reusable by other domains. A short answer would
seem to be "all of them": most meaning in business originates either in
law or accounting. Meanwhile we all need times, places, activities,
units and so on. (06)
Mike (07)
Mason, Howard (UK) wrote:
> Very good note, and clearly indicative of the challenges that we try to
>address in the eBusiness MoU Management Group which sits across a number of
>ISO, IEC, ITU committees, UN/CEFACT, OASIS, OAGIS, SWIFT, GS1 and CEN. ISO
>TC68 participates through their secretariat
>
> It is always a challenge to identify reusable components or patterns from
>existing standards which can save development effort. The end result of
>failure to recognise such synergies is duplicate or incompatible standards.
>
> A good example has been recent work in IEC TC3 to catalogue identification
>schemes, which has revealed the huge duplication that exists in areas such as
>organisation and individual ids.
>
>
>
> For the purposes of archiving, any recipient of this message is deemed to be
>the intended recipient, and there is no restriction on reproduction.
>
>
> Howard Mason
> Corporate IT Office
> Tel: +44 1252 383129
> Mob: +44 780 171 3340
> Eml: howard.mason@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> BAE Systems plc
> Registered Office: 6 Carlton Gardens, London, SW1Y 5AD, UK
> Registered in England & Wales No: 1470151
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>[mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bill Nichols
> Sent: 09 April 2009 02:52
> To: Ontology Summit 2009
> Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] Slight amendment to Gerry's request,plus a
>synopsis request
>
> *** WARNING ***
>
> This mail has originated outside your organization, either from an external
>partner or the Global Internet.
> Keep this in mind if you answer this message.
>
> Sira - nicely said.
>
> At the risk of the beating the point to death, I want to throw in my two
>pennies.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.)
>
> 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
>
> 1) Cross-field fertilization and reference; and
> 2) Managing accumulating information stores.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> An example from the standards world:
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.)
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Best,
>
> BN
>
> Bill Nichols
> Program Director
> Securities Processing Automation
> FISD/SIIA
> 202.789.4480 - o
> 301.873.2812 - c
>
> www.fisd.net
> www.mddl.org
> wiki.fisd.net
>
>
>
> -----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
>
> Dear Joab et al.,
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Thank you for reading until this very line :) Sira
>
>
>
> Sirarat Sarntivijai
> Ph.D. Candidate, Bioinformatics
> Graduate Student Research Assistant, Center for Computational Medicine &
>Bioinformatics National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics
>University of Michigan
>
> siiraa@xxxxxxxxx
> http://www.ccmb.med.umich.edu/
> http://www.ncibi.org/
>
>
>
> On Apr 8, 2009, at 3:44 PM, Mike Bennett wrote:
>
>
>> 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
>> 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
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>>
>
>
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> (08)
--
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 (09)
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