John,
I totally agree with you that "A "system of systems" is a specialization of
a "set or collection of.." is a silly discussion even if I participated in
it. (01)
I strongly agree that " Fundamental questions: Why haven't semantic
technologies been adopted as an integral part of the IT mainstream? What
success stories are there? What problems prevented the technology from
being adopted?
What can we do to develop better technologies or better ways of using the
technology that we already have" is the question that I would like to see
discussed somewhere in tracks 1 and 2. (02)
I have included a message to the participants and leadership regarding such
a discussion for the Thursday meeting. Your statement is exactly what I have
been hoping to get discussed. (03)
Having been in industry and attempted to introduce and use semantic
technology here are a few observations. (04)
Major programs are only going to use software tools that are considered to
have been proven to be scalable, e.g., tools from major vendors. Engineering
tools such as UML and SysML meet these criteria and so are used on large
programs, even though they do not have a formal semantic foundation.
However, industry is beginning to recognize the need for semantic foundation
for standards purposes and also to incorporate formal reasoning in to
product development. The approach that to me that makes sense is to back fit
languages like SysML/UML with formal semantics and demonstrate this on
projects. As a result over time these extensions and revisions will be
adopted as standards by OMG and be used. Another point is that engineers can
use SysML effectively to build large models. They can not effectively use
OWL or FOL. However, with some extensions SysML can be used to generate OWL
or FOL axiom sets. (05)
I have a lot more observations of this sort based on my industry experience. (06)
So any thing you can do to turn the discussion is this direction would be
greatly appreciated by me. (07)
- Henson (08)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2012 10:18 PM
To: ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] Ontology Summit process [was - Re: [Big
Systems and SE] summit session-03] (09)
Henson, Barry, and Amanda, (010)
HG
> A "system of systems" is a specialization of a "set or collection of
> systems" as system of systems as it is commonly used in engineering
> implies some form of interaction between the component systems (011)
This just one example of the kind of vague debate that has been going on for
the past week or two. Could any of it address the following: (012)
Fundamental questions: Why haven't semantic technologies been adopted as an
integral part of the IT mainstream? What success stories are there? What
problems prevented the technology from being adopted?
What can we do to develop better technologies or better ways of using the
technology that we already have? (013)
BS
> Any speaker should be asked to provide empirical evidence to the
> effect that Cyc did indeed bring benefits to any real system (014)
Good question. The best evidence is that people pay real money for
applications to mission critical projects that they use on a daily basis.
Research grants don't count. (015)
But I believe it's important to have *comparisons*. The reason why I
recommended Bill Andersen is that his group used Cyc for DoD projects.
They found the results so promising that they founded Ontology Works about a
dozen years ago. But they discovered that they had to revise their
assumptions in order to develop something that people were willing to pay
for. But they have now been getting more business than they can handle. (016)
The fact that they are still in business by implementing applications that
people are willing to pay for is the kind of empirical evidence we need.
And I'd like to hear Bill's explanation of what works now and how it
compares with what they thought would work in 1998. (017)
AV
> I doubt that *any* use case owner is going to be willing to share
> their case or lessons openly if they feel that the summit will be used
> as a trial venue for them, their system, their methods and such overall. (018)
I'm not asking for use cases. I want to know what Bill (or anybody else who
might have similar experience) thought would work based on his experience
with Cyc in 1998. Then I'd like to know how his way of working on customer
problems changed over the years. How did that experience change their views
of ontology, reasoning methods, and application development? (019)
AV
> We will lose that opportunity if we treat them either as promotional
> sessions or adversarial encounters. (020)
That's why I wanted to emphasize comparisons by the same person with two
very different kinds of systems. I used Bill Andersen as an example, but
comparisons of other changes from something that did not work to something
that did would be useful. (021)
There was an online seminar with Guha about schema,org, but he didn't go
into detail about why "RDF did not catch on" and why Google et al. believe
that schema.org has a better chance. (022)
Big question for the Summit: Why do we need to tell people that ontology is
important? When the WWW came out, there was a chain reaction that led to
explosive growth in a few years, and it's still growing rapidly every day.
No sales pitches were necessary. (023)
But when the Semantic Web came out, there was a huge amount of hype, a lot
of research funding, but no uptake by the IT mainstream. Why? (024)
John (025)
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--- Begin Message ---
As you know I am supposed to be the discussion leader for the Feb 2 Summit discussion. Perhaps we can jointly figure out how to focus the discussion and want if any are the unifying theme for this session. My sense is that we have some convergence that ontology is extremely important for engineering and even specific ideas as to where ontological methods can be applied. I will certainly be happy to listen to more of this kind of discussion. But is there any way to solicit ideas about how to pragmatically inject ontology into the engineering development, given the natural conservatism one finds on large programs and endeavors. This is the problem that I have been confronted with for years in industry Interested in whether you all think this is a useful way to head the discussion, or should we just go with what people want to talk about. Also it would be good to have a list of follow up questions or topics arising from the first session for discussion - Henson |
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