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Re: [ontology-summit] [quality] Evolutionary purpose or function

To: Ontology Summit 2012 discussion <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Mike Bennett <mbennett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:58:45 +0000
Message-id: <4F37D3A5.8040903@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
John,    (01)

I think we may be using the term "Quality" in two different senses.    (02)

Quality Assurance is something of a misnomer - it's about being 
able to formally specify something, then make it, and then 
demonstrate that the thing that was made conforms with the 
requirements formally specified.    (03)

This is nothing new, but it's been around nearer two hundred 
years than two thousand.    (04)

It has little or nothing to do with "Quality" in the natural 
language sense of the term, but is a specific engineering term 
(with an unhelpful choice of label, I find).    (05)

As such, being able to devise a good quality assurance system 
which may be applied to ontologies is certainly of interest to 
people doing work. It is of direct interest to me - I am 
finalizing a submission document for an OMG standard, and in 
writing the section on "Conformance" I find I need to get to 
grips with exactly these QA related issues.    (06)

I doubt very much that the academic AI community has had much 
occasion to discuss industrial-style QA, but if they have it 
would be great to have some links. We have been going through the 
literature as part of the Quality cross-track, and so we're aware 
of such work as OntoClean (Guarino and Welty), QOOD (Gengemi et 
al), OntoMetric (Lozano-Tello and Gomez-Perez), OntoQA (Tartir et 
al), and the work described in Vendrecic et al. If you know of 
others, I'd be glad to hear it, paticularly as I find that a good 
many of those deal with issues that are more structural than 
semantic, and don't touch on the treatments of microtheories 
which Doug Foxvog articulated so clearly and so helpfully in the 
context of Cyc.    (07)

If you have other references that can be applied in the "Quality 
Assurance" sense of quality, I'm all ears. Like I said, the 
resolution of the deep questions does not interest me so much, as 
how these questions may be framed and adequately addressed for 
those of us who do have to produce working ontologies for 
application in commercial environments.    (08)

Mike    (09)

On 12/02/2012 14:26, John F. Sowa wrote:
> On 2/11/2012 1:10 PM, Mike Bennett wrote:
>> The reason I introduced these points was to consider the
>> implications, for ontology quality (with specific reference to
>> large systems, natural and engineered), of the different
>> micro-theories that people bring to the exercise.
>>
>> I hope that was clear.
> Yes, that idea has come across in this huge number of messages
> on the ontology-summit list.
>
> But these issues have been debated in AI related conferences,
> workshops, and email lists for over 20 years.  And they've been
> debated in the philosophical literature for over 2000 years.
>
> As Yogi Berra said, it's deja vu all over again, and again, and...
>
> Unfortunately, people working in mainstream IT have come to the
> conclusion that ontology is for debating societies, not for
> anybody who has real work to do.
>
> I'm all in favor of quality.  But as I said in an earlier note,
> the quality of an ontology is irrelevant to (and more often
> inversely proportional to) its usage.
>
> If that point is ignored, nothing else matters.
>
> John
>
>
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>    (010)


-- 
Mike Bennett
Director
Hypercube Ltd.
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Registered in England and Wales No. 2461068    (011)


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