+1
On 3/3/11 9:09 AM, Amanda Vizedom wrote:
This is a prime reason for keeping ontology
development situated within an application context (or more than
one). Â In my dozen+ years of working with SMEs, I have seen SMEs
approve, reject, spit on, throw things at, celebrate, praise, and
sometimes even understand, at some level, ontologies built on the
basis of their input. None of these reactions is predictive of
whether the ontology actually reflects the knowledge they and
their supporting ontologists are attempting to capture, or whether
it will function as intended for some tasks. Â
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. For example, if
one way an ontology will be used is to create metadata / support
semantic indexing and retrieval, a test corpus of SME domain
documents should be IDed at the outset of development, and
candidate ontologies should be used to create metadata for that
corpus. 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. Â
Yes, that means that the development environment needs to
incorporate testing applications, possibly versions of the
intended end-use applications. And thought needs to be put into
the appropriateness of different tests. 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. That contributes strongly to a QA weakness in many
projects, and lets some go for years, on parallel ontology
development and application development tracks, without adequate
information to know whether their methods will lead them to
their goals.Â
Not that I feel strongly about this point, or anything. ;-)
Amanda
On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 12:10, John F.
Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Jack and Mike,
I agree with that point, but I'd like to add some
qualifications:
JR
> The primary purpose of a semantic model
is to facilitate knowledge
> exchange and choice making in a gaggle of humans in
hopes of
> morphing the gaggle into a system. A key usage is to
inform the
> development of an executable ontology, e.g.,
application software,
> for automation of information flow and decision.
Another key purpose
> is to provide a basis for objective assessment of
enterprise
> situation (aka evidence-based management).
MU
> Yes, this is the kind of thing I'm
after.
The primary qualification is that the "gaggle of humans" can
only
agree on what they understand. Â The people who work in a
field
can all agree that a list of familiar words, as documented
in
their familiar texts, cover their familiar subject matter.
But when ontologists start to axiomatize those terms in some
arcane notation based on some arcane distinctions about
endurants, perdurants, continuants, etc., all bets are off.
John
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