David,
It depends on what the subject of the ontology is, if I had an ontology of a process I expected a computer to be able to do, I would also expect to be able to “enact” that ontology. Fact is, most ontologies don’t include process and service viewpoints.
-Cory
From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Price
Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2012 9:36 PM
To: ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] eXecutable Ontologies? [was: Ontologies are not algorithms]
On 2/2/2012 1:37 AM, Cory Casanave wrote:
While we may be dancing around it I don’t think you can separate executability from ontologies, the entire point of ontologies is to be able to “enact” what the ontology implies.
Hi Cory,
I think this is a case of trying to oversell what ontologies are/can do. In my view, being able to 'enact' implications is in not the 'entire point of ontologies'. A reasoner is an implemented algorithm, an ontology is not. To me, the entire point of ontologies is actually the formal clarity of definition that other technologies lack. Of course, implications are interesting but for something like systems engineering they cover a very small scope compared with what's required to do the job.
In a large scale application, ontologies are IT artifacts, just like RDBs, reasoners, analysis algorithms, visualization algorithms, access control mechanisms, etc. and ontologies and those other IT artifacts must interact. Analysis algorithms can 'execute over' ontologies that contain measurement data that's incomprehensible to a reasoner, just like it could execute over an HDF5 dataset of the same measurements - so we're going too far in suggesting that the ontology is itself executable or that it's not useful otherwise.
A perhaps related comment : I had a debate a few months ago with someone who claimed that 'you cannot test a reasoner'. In the end, a reasoner is just an implemented algorithm (similar to a compiler) and so normal software testing approaches can be applied ... this stuff ain't magic i.e. it's complicated, but not complex. To me a more interesting concern is 'How do you test a large-scale ontology?' and ... 'Can you only really test the algorithms that execute over it?'
Cheers,
David
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