Dear Leo, (01)
> I'm sorry, but you are rewriting history if you conflate data models with
> ontologies, and you are misrepresenting computer science distinctions. I
> recall in the late 1980s, papers in the relational database community that
> began to address semantic data models. Even these were not ontologies. The
> database folks did not address only real world semantics, but included
many
> system and database level constructs -- as data models still do. (02)
MW: Are you suggesting that systems and databases are not things in the real
world?
>
> Ontologies really were something new, in the early-mid 1990s. I know
because I
> advocated the use of ontologies in the late 1980s (when I got to
Intelligent
> Business Systems, a pre-Internet start-up company with a natural language
> interface to relational databases), coming off of projects at MCC that
used
> Cyc. The emergence of work and KR standards from the DARPA Knowledge
Sharing
> Initiative (KIF, Ontolingua, Generic Frame Protocol/OKBC, and KQML), now
> largely identified by Tom Gruber's initial publications, AND the use of
> ontological analysis by Nicola Guarino, along with Cyc's large-scale
efforts
> on commonsense "semantics", in that 1993-1995 period enabled the emergence
of
> ontological engineering, with ontologies as a distinct new content
> representation. (03)
MW: I quite agree that all this work was very significant, which largely
grew out of what was called in the '70s Artificial Intelligence. And I'm
quite happy that this is described as ontology. But what I do not think is
justified is a terminology landgrab that says that this is all that can be
called ontology in a computational sense.
>
> I have no problem with data models, but they are not ontologies, and to
> confuse the two is harmful and historically inaccurate. Some of the most
> advanced commercial ontological work is that performed by the
> HighFleet/Ontology Works folks (Bill Andersen, etc.), and they essentially
> have a deductive database application, with ontologies and rule-reasoning
> (i.e., logic programming) built on top of relational and object databases
> (with set-at-time operations best done by RDBs). (04)
MW: I'm not quite sure what you are arguing for here. On the one hand you
are saying that databases are not ontologies, and on the other hand you are
saying that the deductive database work of Bill Anderson is amongst the best
ontology work around. You seem to be arguing against yourself. (05)
MW: For me it is reasonable to describe something as a computational
ontology if it is a description of some domain and includes some rules about
that domain. To limit what can be called an ontology to something from a
particular thread of development or a particular set of implementation
technologies is inappropriate. (06)
Regards (07)
Matthew West
Information Junction
Tel: +44 560 302 3685
Mobile: +44 750 3385279
matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.informationjunction.co.uk/
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/ (08)
This email originates from Information Junction Ltd. Registered in England
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Registered office: 2 Brookside, Meadow Way, Letchworth Garden City,
Hertfordshire, SG6 3JE. (09)
>
> To me, some seminal papers in the late 1980s that allowed ontologies (as
> engineering product) to emerge in the 1990s (and some of the important
papers)
> include the following selections, roughly in chronological order:
>
> Peckham, Joan; Fred Maryanski. 1988. Semantic Data Models. ACM Computing
> Surveys, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 1988.
>
> Reiter, R. 1989. Towards a Logical Reconstruction of Relational Database
> Theory., In: Mylopoulos, & Brodie, ed. Readings in Artificial
Intelligence
> and Databases. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufman, pp. 301-326.
>
> Brachman, Ronald; Levesque, Hector; Reiter, Raymond. 1989. Proceedings of
> First International Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning,
> Toronto, Canada, May 15-18, 1989. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufman.
>
> Gallaire, H; Minker, J.; Nicolas, J-M. 1989. Logic and Databases: A
Deductive
> Approach. In: Mylopoulos, & Brodie, ed. Readings in Artificial
Intelligence
> and Databases. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufman, pp. 231-247.
>
> Gardarin, Georges; Valduriez, Patrick. 1989. Relational Databases and
> Knowledge Bases. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
>
> Ullman, Jeffrey. 1988. Principles of Database and Knowledge-Base
Systems,
> Volume I. Rockville, MD: Computer Science Press.
>
> Ullman, Jeffrey. 1989. Principles of Database and Knowledge-Base
Systems,
> Volume II: The New Technologies. Rockville, MD: Computer Science Press.
>
> Guha, R.V.; Lenat, Douglas. 1990. Cyc: A Mid-Term Report.
Microelectronics
> Technology and Computer Corporation (MCC), Austin, Tx. Technical Report
ACT-
> CYC-134-90.
>
> Gruber, Thomas. 1993. A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology
> Specifications. Knowledge Acquisition 5, pp. 199-220.
>
> Gruber, Thomas. 1995. Towards Principles for the Design of Ontologies
used
> for Knowledge Sharing. International Journal of Human and Computer
Studies,
> 43(5/6), pp. 907-928.
>
> Fox, Mark; Gruninger, M. 1994. Ontologies for Enterprise Integration. In:
> Cooperative Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Cooperative Information
> Systems, Toronto, Ontario.
>
> Guarino, N, ed. 1998. Formal Ontology in Information Systems.
Amsterdam.:
> IOS Press. Proceedings of the First International Conference (FOIS'98),
June
> 6-8, Trent, Italy.
>
> Guarino N. 1994. The Ontological Level. Invited paper Presented at IV
> Wittgenstein Symposium, Kirchberg, Austria, 1993. In R. Casati, B. Smith
and
> G. White (eds.), Philosophy and the Cognitive Sciences, Vienna, Hölder-
> Pichler-Tempsky.
>
> Guarino, N.; Giaretta, P. 1995. Ontologies and Knowledge Bases: Towards a
> Terminological Clarification. In: N. Mars, ed. Towards Very Large
Knowledge
> Bases: Knowledge Building and Knowledge Sharing. IOS Press, Amsterdam:
25-32.
> http://www.loa-cnr.it/Papers/KBKS95.pdf.
>
> Gruninger, M. and Fox, M.S. 1995. Methodology for the design and
evaluation
> of ontologies. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Basic Ontological Issues
in
> Knowledge Sharing, IJCAI-95, Montreal.
>
> Borgo, Stefano; Guarino, Nicola; Masolo, Claudio. 1996. Towards an
> Ontological Theory of Physical Objects. National Research Council,
LADSEB-
> CNR, Padova, Italy.
>
> Uschold, Michael; Gruninger, Michael. 1996. Ontologies: Principles,
Methods,
> and Applications. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 11(2), pp. 93-136.
>
> Finally, you might also look at the early Ontolog Ontologies and Databases
> series, for some distinctions.
>
> Thanks,
> Leo
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontology-summit-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
> Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2010 6:53 PM
> To: ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] Invitation to a brainstorming call for the
2011
> Ontology Summit
>
> Deborah, Matthew, Ahsan, Steve, Ali, Nicola, and Jack,
>
> DMcP:
> > In your view is it even possible for model-driven exchange environments
> > to succeed without including ontologies?
>
> MW:
> > I would argue that databases are willy nilly ontologies, since they
> > make statements about the sorts of things there are, and some rules
> > that govern them. Perhaps more importantly a database can be a very
> > suitable implementation environment for an ontology, depending on
> > what your purposes are.
>
> I agree with Matthew. In the 1970s, DB designers were discussing
> very similar issues about ontology that we are talking about here.
>
> Type hierarchies, E-R diagrams, and Petri nets were used in the 1960s,
> they were adopted by the DB community, and they are part of the UML
> collection. In fact, UML diagrams are probably the most widely used
> notation for ontologies on planet earth. UML plus OCL (the object-
> constraint language) provides a *superset* of OWL, but in a much more
> readable notation.
>
> The programming community is already familiar with UML diagrams,
> which provide representations for type hierarchies, for the type
> constraints and cardinality constraints on relations, for time
> dependencies in activity diagrams, etc. If more expressive power is
> needed, UML also includes OCL as a general-purpose notation for FOL.
>
> That is far more expressive power in a far more readable format
> than OWL. You can translate any OWL ontology to UML, but not
> vice-versa.
>
> AM:
> > What do you think about SKOS-XL instead OWL for building ontology?
>
> I have no objection to anybody using whatever tools they find useful.
> But it shows that OWL is a very difficult language to learn and use
> effectively. Much simpler languages supplemented with diagrams
> would be very attractive to many users.
>
> SW:
> > Would that I had a nickel for every time I've seen someone misinterpret
> > a "controlled English" sentence.
>
> I'd be delighted to take that bet, provided that you give me a penny for
> every time I've seen somebody misinterpret a statement in some formal
> language (logic, programming language, etc.).
>
> Please note that COBOL is a rather poor example of what can be done
> with English-like syntax, but it was the most widely used programming
> language during the second half of the 20th century.
>
> SW:
> > My conclusion, then, is that end users are likely to understand
> > the benefits of ontologies well before programmers.
>
> Programmers and database administrators understood the need for
> ontologies since the 1970s. But they called them conceptual schemas,
> structured analysis and design, etc.
>
> SW:
> > The model in question is IDEF1-X. Information exchange is based
> > on database replication...
>
> That's ontology! Note Matthew's comment and my response.
>
> AH:
> > The argument I've used (with limited, but notable success) with the
> > programmers around me, is that an ontology can also serve as a
> > contract between the software development team and each module.
>
> I agree. And the people who were designing software development
> tools in the 1970s used very similar arguments. The only missing
> jargon was the word 'ontology'. Instead, they used terms like
> 'specification' or 'conceptual schema' or even 'IDEF1X'.
>
> AH:
> > Fleshing out these different roles would be instrumental in helping
> > focus and identifying the different types of supporting arguments.
>
> MB:
> > Another way of framing this is that every application has an ontology
> > anyway. The question is how it is framed, if at all. Are the meanings
> > of terms resident only in the head of the developer, or in some logical
> > model with written term definitions (weak semantics) or in a formal
> > language which > grounds the meanings of terms with reference to some
> > logical formalism?
>
> I agree with both of those statements. And I encourage anybody who
> has been using OWL to take another look at UML. For most of what
> they do with OWL, they could specify much more clearly with UML.
>
> SW:
> > It's probably better to think of every application having multiple views
> > of data. The view that is presented to the user may differ significantly
> > from the view that's in memory, which in turn may differ from the view
> > that's persisted.
>
> I strongly agree. And that's another argument for UML as a better
> ontology language than OWL. The various diagrams give you multiple
> views of the subject. But OWL is designed to enforce tunnel vision.
>
> SW:
> > The case to make is that the OWL model of information is more "natural"
> > than the relational model, so the application developer spends less time
> > and effort translating a business model to OWL than to SQL.
>
> SQL happens to be a very primitive version of the relational model.
> Ted Codd was not happy about the SQL version of relational semantics.
> In 1979, Codd and Date made a strong case for adding a type hierarchy
> in the RM/T extensions. In fact, I assumed a type hierarchy in my
> first published article on conceptual graphs in 1976:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/cg1976.pdf
> Conceptual Graphs for a Database Interface
>
> NG:
> > Deciding how much effort to put in developing a particular ontology
> > is a crucial choice, and it is very important to distinguish the cases
> > where a proper ontological analysis pays off, and is indeed a crucial
> > aspect of success, from those where a "lightweight" approach is
sufficient.
>
> I agree. In fact, there is a great deal of informal analysis that must
> be done before it's possible to write any kind of formal specification.
>
> JR:
> > How about engaging them in a survey to estimate the cost of "IT Babel"
> > in their respective enterprises? We might even mention the trillion
> > dollar elephant in the room --- insecure systems.
>
> That is indeed a serious problem. People have been talking about it
> since the 1970s. The only thing new is that the word 'ontology' has
> been thrown into the pot. But talking has not solved the problems.
>
> John
>
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