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Re: [ontology-summit] Invitation to a brainstorming call for the 2011 On

To: Ontology Summit 2011 discussion <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 11:15:28 -0500
Message-id: <4D08E9A0.90401@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Dear Matthew, Leo, Jack, and Cecil,    (01)

LO:
> 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:
> 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 land grab that says that
> this is all that can be called ontology in a computational sense.    (03)

I agree with Matthew and Leo.  There's a difference between an ontology
and a data model, but that point was recognized in the 1970s, with the
ANSI/SPARC three-schema model.  The conceptual schema was described
in different ways by different people, but many of them defined it
in a way that is indistinguishable from modern ontologies.    (04)

For anybody who wants a "time stamp" on ideas, I recommend the following
collection of position papers that were presented in 1980:    (05)

    http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/sigmod/pingree80.html
    Workshop on Data Abstraction, Databases and Conceptual Modelling    (06)

This workshop brought together a few dozen people from the DB, AI,
and programming language communities.  Pat Hayes and I are two of the
AI people who still participate in Ontolog Forum.    (07)

JR:
> In one case, early 1970's, Simula educed a new way of representing
> intelligence spacecraft in a computational device. Then current
> practice was to write programs representing the spacecraft operations
> and limits.    (08)

Yes.  Simula 67 was the world's first object-oriented programming
language, and in some respects it was more advanced than some current
versions.  Some of the talks at that 1980 conference related those
techniques to AI and DB -- in ways that are called ontology today.    (09)

COL:
> Can you explain your statement "You can translate any OWL ontology
> to UML, but not vice-versa."
>
> The OMG Ontology Definition Metamodel specification seems to contradict
> your statement. Table 16.12 of the specification lists the OWL features
> with no equivalent UML feature as :
>
> Thing, global properties, autonomous individual' allValuesFrom,
> someValuesFrom, SymmetricProperty, TransitiveProperty, Classes as
> instances, disjointWith, complementOf    (010)

I was the one who stated the original quotation above. The passage
from the OMG document didn't make a clear distinction between logic
and ontology.    (011)

UML consists of a variety of diagrams types, each of which represents
one subset of logic together with some built-in ontology.  But UML
supplements the diagrams with the Object-Constraint Language (OCL),
which can express full first-order logic.    (012)

Class diagrams are the most widely used diagram type, and they
represent a very large part of what people represent in OWL, but
I agree that OWL can represent more detail about some important
aspects.    (013)

But the other UML diagrams represent many aspects that OWL cannot
represent, and OCL is a superset of what OWL can express.    (014)

In any case, the greatest strength of the UML diagrams is their
highly readable way of representing multiple aspects of a system
in a way that connects with design and development methodologies.
I prefer to use the  word 'mosaic' for the UML languages and to
treat OWL as one component that could be added to the UML mosaic.    (015)

But I would emphasize that OWL should be treated as just one
component.  The UML scope is much broader and more inclusive
than OWL.    (016)

John    (017)

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