Dear John,
I strongly agree with both of your points: (1) nearly every large sytem is
unique and (2) for standards one needs to examine what works and harmonize
best practices. (01)
While (1) is true one needs (formal) specifications to judge deviations
from. One of my current research projects is extending the kind of stuff you
see there to specifications for product lines as well as approximate
satisfaction of an individual system against a specification. Regarding
(2) I believe that there is sufficiently developed engineering usage in what
works and that it can be used to develop precise semantics for engineering
languages and formal ontologies that engineers can actually use. Further
this can be retrofitted with the languages that they use without any
necessity of their changing how they work. Engineering usage background is
well beyond the stone age as I am sure that you would agree. (02)
- Henson (03)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 11:34 AM
To: ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] Ontology Engineering for Systems Engineering (04)
Dear Matthew and Henson, (05)
This thread raises some important points: Nearly every large system is
unique, there are many common patterns, "local things" pop up in
unpredictable ways, and working systems are revised and extended throughout
their useful lifetimes. (IBM uses the term 'functionally stabilized' as a
euphemism for 'obsolete'.) (06)
HG
>> If the diagram is a specification for which there may be many or no
>> realizations... (07)
MW
> Distillation units are generally one-off constructions, there may be
> some common features, but things like the local climate and
> availability of cooling water, and its temperature, will all affect
> the design. But there is a design as well as the individual even so,
> just only one implementation. (08)
Note those local "things" like "climate and availability of cooling water,
and its temperature". Just consider how a common pattern will change from
the tropics to the arctic, from a desert to a swamp, and from solid ground
to a ship or a plane. (09)
Linux has been implemented on cell phones and supercomputers, but those
local things can create huge differences. (010)
HG
> For example one has an ontology (pattern) for an aircraft decomposition.
> These patterns can greatly accelerate product development...
> I haven't noticed any comments regarding the formulation of patterns,
> or for that matter any substantive comments on the whole dialog. (011)
I agree that the essence of ontology involves the discovery of patterns and
their formulation as generalized, reusable formulas or templates. (012)
HG
> An engineer friend of mine in charge of a line of semiconductor
> manufacturing systems (very large, complex and expensive) pointed out
> that when they made a service call for a customer's system, the first
> thing was to identify what had been added or changed since it was
> delivered. These are as you know the real world of engineering and any
> useful formalism has to address this kind of thing. (013)
I very strongly agree. (014)
MW
> Actually two plants genuinely being identical in specification is
> surprisingly rare. I can only think of 2 occasions where this has
happened.
> In both cases the plants were built next to each other. A much more
> usual circumstance is that a design is evolved and developed from a
previous one. (015)
That observation is just as true of computer systems. Developers are more
likely to learn from and imitate patterns they see in a successful
implementation than in somebody's abstract ontology. (016)
In the thread "What goes into a Lexicon?" in Ontolog Forum, I made a
recommendation that is just as relevant to this thread: (017)
JFS
> Recommendation: Instead of developing "proactive" standards for
> ontology, I suggest that we note the law of standards: examine what
> actually works, harmonize the best practices, and build the new
> additions as extensions to the de facto standards. (018)
The law of standards was explained in the following excerpt. (019)
John
_______________________________________________________________________ (020)
In 1991, I formulated a "Law of Standards" that is repeatedly confirmed by
every group that tries to develop a so-called "proactive" standard: (021)
Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official
standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of
some simpler system as a de facto standard for X. (022)
See http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/standard.htm (023)
Another confirmation of the law of standards: The W3C proposed OWL as "The
Web Ontology Language" and RDF triples for the data. The
results: (1) The overwhelming number of OWL ontologies published on the WWW
are limited to the subset of logic that Aristotle defined for his
syllogisms. (2) JSON has become the de facto standard that programmers use
instead of RDF. (3) The schema.org developed by Google, Microsoft, and
Yahoo! replaces RDF and OWL with the simpler de facto standards of JSON and
Aristotle. (024)
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