Re: [ontology-summit] An example of the worth of ontology development

[Adrian Walker <adriandwalker@xxxxxxxxx>]

 Hi Leo,

You wrote:

...ontology tools enable a SME to do the right thing without showing the hairy details (and no tool I've found does that),...

Actually, the design of our our Executable English tool attempts to do just that.   (The tool is online at the site below.)

 Rather than have an ontologist produce technical notation and then map that to something SME-friendly, the tool accepts  Executable English input, reasons with it, and explains its answers -- all at the SME English level.

There's an underlying technical notation of course, but the Executable English is mapped automatically to and from it.  So, no-one needs to see the technical details.

A bonus  in this approach is that Google indexes and searches the Executable English, which is helpful for re-use.

Apologies to folks who have seen this before, and thanks for comments.

                                                    -- Adrian
                   
Internet Business Logic
A Wiki and SOA Endpoint for Executable Open Vocabulary English Q/A over SQL and RDF
Online at www.reengineeringllc.com    
Shared use is free, and there are no advertisements

Adrian Walker
Reengineering

On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 3:10 PM, Obrst, Leo J. <lobrst@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It is usually the case that you don't want to show the SMEs the details of the ontology, since they will not know how to interpret what they see. We had this issue in spades at VerticalNet, e.g., where the application actually exposed the ontology as categories in the user interface, rather than present a better GUI in terms of the audience. We dubbed this the representation vs. presentation issue. Applications ALWAYS need to provide their own application view to the user, not just expose the underlying technical model, especially for ontologies, where the plumbing could be axioms and logical assertions/rules.

Now if your SME is indeed also an ontologist, or your ontology tools enable a SME to do the right thing without showing the hairy details (and no tool I've found does that), then you can show the representation. Otherwise, always show the presentation view.

You'll scare the hell out of SMEs because they will interpret your ontology class/property "label" as a word that they and their comparable users don't use. And what's all these backward Es and upside down As and arrows? In much the same way, you don't allow end users to develop crucial enterprise databases themselves, you don't allow them to develop ontologies unless they are also ontologists. Term \= Concept. Application category \= ontological axiom.

However, you do need to show SMEs that the results of the application of the ontology are good, accurate, and granular. E.g., for database integration efforts, you need them to confirm that the competency questions are answered well, accurately, and at the right level of granularity. Results, they can judge well.  Plumbing, they can't.

Furthermore, no ontology develop by committees! The committee is the stakeholder association, not the technical ontology development team, the latter of which should be small and ontology savvy. The stakeholder committee needs to know that their semantics are captured, and this is best done by application results and a strong data/ontology dictionary/lexicon/glossary, in addition to audience-tempered briefings.

Thanks,
Leo

_____________________________________________
Dr. Leo Obrst        The MITRE Corporation, Information Semantics
lobrst@xxxxxxxxx     Information Discovery & Understanding, Command & Control Center
Voice: 703-983-6770  7515 Colshire Drive, M/S H305
Fax: 703-983-1379    McLean, VA 22102-7508, USA

 


-----Original Message-----
From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2011 2:33 PM
To: Amanda Vizedom
Cc: Ontology Summit 2011 discussion

Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] An example of the worth of ontology development

On 3/3/2011 12:09 PM, Amanda Vizedom wrote:
> If we want SME validation of an ontology, we need to produce a
> validation test that uses the formalized ontology to do something, and
> that something needs to have results within the SMEs area of
> understanding and practice. If we want the ontology to be multipurpose
> and reusable, we should have a variety of such tests. Rather than
> relying on yet another semi-intelligible visualization of the ontology,
> and SME feedback on whether this seems right, we should incorporate
> functional testing into the ontology development and validation workflow.

I very strongly agree with that point.

For an example of a tool that we are currently developing at VivoMind,
see slides 26 to 30 of the following presentation:

   http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/futures.pdf

Slides 26 to 28 describe the proto-ontology extractor, which works with
a SME to develop an ontology from a set of documents about some subject.

The SMEs get immediate feedback from it by seeing that their changes
to the ontology produce improved results:  more accurate answers to
their questions about the documents, and improved precision and recall
of the desired data.

> Part of the SME validation should be search & retrieval tests on the corpus,
> to see whether the ontology creates results that reflect the SME knowledge.

We are still at an early stage of development.  But we demonstrated
better results in comparison with other tools that the SMEs had used.

> And a bit a time and effort need to go into developing these up front.
> IME that up-front time and effort is not often done, and budgets don't include it.

Speaking as a partner in a small business, we can only do what
our clients pay us to do.  They usually pay for results, not for
studies that show how or whether we could produce results.

John




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