On 31/01/2011 10:02 AM, John F. Sowa wrote:
> On 1/31/2011 3:30 AM, Matthew West wrote:
>> “Did you know we lost an important customer last week/month/year? We
>> billed him for $100k twice, and kept on pursuing him when he had paid
>> the bill because of the second bill. That was all because he had
>> different names in different systems.”
> That has been happening forever, and a good ontology, by itself,
> won't solve it.
>
> If you want more examples, I recommend Bill Kent's book, _Data and
> Reality_, which was written in 1978 and reissued in paperback in 2000.
> Bill presented many good examples about databases, which are just
> as appropriate for ontologies. (There is nothing new under the sun
> -- or in the Semantic Web.)
>
> Example:
>
> An oil company had different definitions of 'oil well' in their
> geology department and their financial department:
>
> Geology: An oil well is a hole drilled or dug for the purpose of
> obtaining oil, whether or not it turned out to be dry.
>
> Finance: An oil well is a pipe connected to one or more holes
> that produce oil -- no records of dry holes and the data for
> multiple holes is merged.
>
> They wanted to relate the two databases in order to correlate
> the production data with the geological data. But the two
> definitions were incompatible.
>
> Another example:
>
> A mining company used mules to pull ore out of their mines because
> they wanted to avoid sparks that might trigger an explosion. To
> keep track of their mules, they assigned them employee numbers.
> When they automated their databases, they added an extra option
> to the sex field: Male, Female, or Mule.
> (01)
I suppose that the HR department had a few requests to change the gender
definitions on a human to "Mule". (02)
> John
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> 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/OntologySummit2011/
> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2011
> Community Portal: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
> (03)
_________________________________________________________________
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/OntologySummit2011/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2011
Community Portal: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ (04)
|