Henson,
The subject you mention "Why haven't semantic technologies been adopted as an integral part of the IT mainstream?" is the exact argument of my PhD dissertation. I am exploring what standards, technology, education, infrastructure, business culture issues affect whether a semantic solution is chosen by an organization (with a focus on the business enterprise).
I would look forward to hearing case studies of those enterprises and institutions that have adopted some form of semantics and what the factors were that lead to their adoption.
I am currently working on a survey to put out in the public domain to elicit responses from semantic vendors, enterprises, academia, and government.
Bradley Shoebottom
Information Architect - R&D, Innovatia Inc.
Tel: (506) 674-5439 | Skype: bradleyshoebottom | Toll-Free: 1-800-363-3358 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting
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-----Original Message-----
From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of henson graves
Sent: January-29-12 10:56 AM
To: 'Ontology Summit 2012 discussion'
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] Ontology Summit process [was - Re: [Big Systems and SE] summit session-03]
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.
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.
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.
Having been in industry and attempted to introduce and use semantic technology here are a few observations.
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.
I have a lot more observations of this sort based on my industry experience.
So any thing you can do to turn the discussion is this direction would be greatly appreciated by me.
- Henson
-----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]
Henson, Barry, and Amanda,
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
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:
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?
BS
Any speaker should be asked to provide empirical evidence to the
effect that Cyc did indeed bring benefits to any real system
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
AV
We will lose that opportunity if we treat them either as promotional
sessions or adversarial encounters.
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.
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.
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.
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?
John
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