On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 3:28 PM, Alexander Garcia Castro <alexgarciac@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Who will keep the N-squared mappings up to date, for an N that is increasing, if AGC gets his way, without limit? Who will pay for this ever increasing mapping effort? Who will oversee the mapping effort? " are the ontology gate keepers going to address all requirements? even those from people whose projects dont have anything to do with who ever is paying them (the gate keepers).
this is not "my way" or "your way". the question could also be presented the other way around: Who will pay for this ever increasing coordination effort involving all domains, several countries, several communities of practice following several practices, a diversity of requirements, etc.
The effort is much less, corresponds to what people want to do anyway (to avoid silos), because it is very much a part of information-driven science
"One day we will, I hope, know which language to use"
only JAVA? only Python? PERL is forbidden? only OWL? only OBO?
we don't know yet currently the OBO Foundry uses a mixture of OWL and OBO, with back and forth conversion via software people also use all the other things you mention, of course, but the issue is what will be the language used for native development of the ontologies; not JAVA, I guess
programming languages are picked depending on the purpose, skills available in your team, pre existing data, reusable code, and a lot of other factors. some times when developing software having one single language is just impossible (pre existing software, software to be re used, etc). it is about interoperability not about "one single view". Ontologies are mostly pieces of software, why not learning from software development instead of trying to go someones way? again, it is about interoperability not about having one single ontology. Even from within the biomedical domain it is easy to see how interoperability has contributed to the evolution of bioinformatics, see biojava, biopython, bioperl, etc. should there be one single bio<programming language>? no... should there be bridges across these bio projects? sure. could one single bio project cover all my needs? depends but most likely not.
I guess you might usefully join, too, a mature ontology development effort, to see how such work differs from software development. I think you will discover that, for a number of reasons, it is not true that "Ontologies are mostly pieces of software"
This is not about imposing one single view. This is about interoperability.
I agree. The Foundry strategy for achieving interoperability involves voluntary acceptance by the different disciplinary groups within a large community to develop their respective ontologies collaboratively in conformity with the goal of a single ontology for each domain. The ontologies in question evolve with the need to take account of the different views of the participants in the process.
BS On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 2:07 PM, Barry Smith <phismith@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 2:35 PM, Alexander Garcia Castro <alexgarciac@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Barry Smith: Too many ontologies are creating semantic silios, we need only one ontology per domain, and can only afford one."
Did he say that? "one ontology per domain"? I dont like that idea; also, it seems unpractical.
It is already being put into practice in the biomedical domain:
see also:
what if the ontology does not cover the domain in the way u need it?
The developers of the OBO Foundry ontologies commit to collaborate with their users and to work with them to extend the OBO Foundry ontologies when needed ; all of these Foundry ontology development efforts have term request trackers for this purpose.
it happens very often that u need to extend existing ontologies, it also happens that such extensions involve the definition of several axioms, rules and at the end u get a significantly different ontology -a violation to the one ontology and one ontology only.
For this approach to work, the extension has of course to be done carefully, and in a coordinated fashion. The fact that people violate the one-ontology-per-domain principle seems not to be an argument against this principle.
if you consider the upper level ontologies (BFO, DOLCE), so should we all stick to one of them and support one of them only?
At the point where one of them has demonstrated that it is good enough for this purpose, yes. And I think the developers of these ontologies would be ready to accept the needed merger (I think this is true of the BFO and DOLCE developers, for instance).
also impractical. not to mention that upper level ontologies like BFO and the like are not always used when developing ontologies -in some papers the actual need for such ontologies has been discussed.
Do you have examples of major cross-disciplinary practical success in integration which do not involve some upper-level ontology?
What about the representation language? should it also be "one language only"? if this is the case, also unpractical.
One day we will, I hope, know which language to use. (Just as we know which language to use for arithmetic.) When that stage is reached everyone intending to do sensible ontology work will, surely, be likely to use the common representation language.
silos, sure there are silos. but having one single ontology does not solve the problem. actually IMHO it does not solve anything. it could probably be a good idea to address the issue of interoperability across ontologies rather than pretending to have " one ontology per domain".
Who will keep the N-squared mappings up to date, for an N that is increasing, if AGC gets his way, without limit? Who will pay for this ever increasing mapping effort? Who will oversee the mapping effort?
BS On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Brand Niemann <bniemann@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Introduction
I am Brand Niemann, Semantic Community, and recently completed 30 years of federal services at the US EPA as senior enterprise architect and data science. I am interested in the role of ontology in semantic interoperability and the application of semantic interoperability to major applications like Federal Cloud Computing, Enterprise Architecture and SOA, and Knowledge Management and Computational Journalism. Mills Davis and I are restarting the Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP) and are trying to do at least one activity each month – please see our Events Calendar at http://semanticommunity.info/#Events_Calendar . We look forward to collaborating with you.
Comments During the First Morning
There are two simple concepts expressed during presentations by the two major government-funded ontology programs (EU and US JPDO) that I have yet to hear mentioned as follows:
1.Ontolog Forum, March 17th, Perspective from the European Commission
SteveRay: Ah - good quote: "The need comes first, ontologies come later" See Chat Log: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2011_03_17#nid2QHC
2. Ontology Driven Implementation of Semantic Services for the Enterprise Environment (ODISSEE) Workshop, April 19, 2011
Barry Smith: Too many ontologies are creating semantic silios, we need only one ontology per domain, and can only afford one.
See: http://semanticommunity.info/Build_TOGAF_in_the_Cloud#Ontology_Driven_Implementation_of_Semantic_Services.c2.a0for_the_Enterprise_Environment_(ODISSEE)_Workshop
and specifically Barry Smith at http://semanticommunity.info/Build_TOGAF_in_the_Cloud#Barry_Smith
and the summary slides I sent previously at http://semanticommunity.info/@api/deki/files/10494/=BrandNiemann04142011.pptx
So there are questions of sequencing and number of ontologies that need to be addressed.
Grand Challenges I think the Ontology Community should engage in Challenges and Competitions (not the Grand Challenge) especially say for health data. I have participated in three so far and have not seen any using ontology – see http://semanticommunity.info/Build_the_Health_Data_Infrastructure_in_the_Cloud
Brand
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-- Alexander Garcia http://www.alexandergarcia.name/http://www.usefilm.com/photographer/75943.html
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http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexgarciacPostal address: Alexander Garcia, Tel.: +49 421 218 64211
Universität Bremen Enrique-Schmidt-Str. 5 D-28359 Bremen
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