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)
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