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Nicola,
Thanks for thoughtful comments. I can easily remove some of those sound bites, if they are confusing. Better to leave in just those that are easy to agree with. BTW< there is a new version now - in the same google doc as before. IT is called "... take 4" now. You can see a separate message on that.
I took your first round of comments into account, I added the contact fine print quote.
I have adobe 10.0.1 and it is quite slow and painful to process comments. Should not be this way - sigh.
Michael On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 7:54 AM, Nicola Guarino <nicolguar@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Folks,
please find some more comments attached, produced during my flight... (I hope the annotated pdf file is readable - produced with Preview on a Mac)
Besides minor things, my most relevant comments concern some of the "sound bites":
1. Ontology as a new paradigm -
"Ontology does for machines what the World Wide Web did for people." Steve Ray
This is interesting, but I suspect it is very ambiguous...
I see there is a sense according to which this statement might be true (I don't know if this is what you have in mind, Steve):
- the Web allows people to access to (almost) all the data they need, which however need still to be interpreted by people to become useful information.
- Ontologies help machines, so to speak, to get the data they need, extracting them from the Web...
But I am not conviced, altogether. In my opinion, the message should be that, first of all, ontologies are for people (and indeed we do convey such message in the rest of the communiqué). From the machines point of view, ontologies ultimately rely on primitives which make no sense as such (unless machines are able to ground them on perception, but this is a research issue). To me, ontologies are there to help people (who are using machines) to understand each other, by making explicit (to people) the hidden assumptions made by the programmers of such machines .
Maybe the viceversa holds: ontology does for people what the world wide does for machines:
- through shared Web services, machines are able to use each other's data;
- through shared ontologies, people are able to use each other's data (possibly with the mediation of machines)...
2. Ontology as a way of clarifying meaning -
“The secret to making a good movie is getting everyone to make the same movie." So it is with enterprises and that's what ontologies do.' Jack Ring
Again, this risks to be interpreted in a dangerous way, as people may come to the conclusion that ontologists want to force "everyone to make the same movie". Sure, adopting the same ontology is like playing in the same movie, but ontologies can do more, namely letting people understand whether or not they are playing the same movie, and if not, why not... Moreover, they can help establish comparisons and mapping across multiple movies...
Perhaps the following sound bite can help understanding the role of ontologies to clarify meaning (I think Peter put it on the wiki somewhere):
An ontology is like a contract's fine print, one of those things which require a very precise technical jargon, which you might ignore in many cases, but which can save your business in critical situations...
3. Ontology as a way to improve agility and flexibility -
“There are three main things that ontologies are good for: flexibility, flexibility and flexibility” Michael Uschold
I think this flexibility point should be expanded, as clearly flexibility might be intended in many different ways. In which sense does ontology increase flexibility? To me, the answers are: 1) it detaches signs from their meanings; 2) it helps recognizing each aspect of the domain as a "first class citizen", to which you can attach information independently of the rest....
Best,
Nicola
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