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Re: [ontology-summit] [Making the Case] Elevator Pitch

To: ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Ron Wheeler <rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2011 10:10:23 -0500
Message-id: <4D46D0DF.80000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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
>
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>    (03)


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