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Hi Alan and all,
On 12/18/2012 6:59 AM, Alan Rector wrote:
All
An issue that I don't see clearly in the correspondence is:
How does ontology development fits into the larger life cycle
of information system development? Answering requires some
statement on the scope of ontologies and how they relate to
other knowledge and information models.
I agree, although we have had a number of conversations on this
topic at OMG that may be useful to consider.
JPL has used ontologies as a basis for analyzing systems engineering
models (in the form of UML/SysML models that reuse specific
vocabularies prescribed by the JPL systems engineering team) quite
successfully. They have some set of "utility" or "foundational"
ontologies they use as a basis for this work, including a set of
ontologies that describe JPL's engineering business processes and
some that correspond to SysML terminology. There are presentations
on the OMG server about some of the work they've done, available via
the Systems Engineering Domain SIG wiki (http://syseng.omg.org/).
If you take a look at presentations from the March 2012 meeting in
Reston, you'll see one by Nicolas Rouquette, JPL, that touches on
this, and some of David Price's presentations from that meeting and
more recently may do so as well. The December 2011 meeting in Santa
Clara includes a JPL presentation that may provide some additional
background, also by Nicolas, that helps in understanding the March
2012 update.
One thing to note is that in order to achieve their goals, JPL uses
a highly constrained subset of OWL, and similarly, a constrained
subset of UML, to ensure consistency and to support their
methodology. But, they have metrics (that may not be stated in
these presentations) demonstrating how much improvement they've been
able to achieve in the quality of their systems engineering models
by doing this, and it's impressive. Given that they only get "one
shot" for most systems they build, the lengths to which they are
willing to go to ensure system quality are fairly extreme, and it's
not clear whether or not other organizations would be willing to do
the same. A number of OMG SE DSIG members, including automotive and
aerospace companies among others, are taking a serious look, though.
I think this set of use cases is different from what I've seen other
folks say about knowledge driven / data driven systems so far. I
don't have a lot of information on their processes related to model
evolution and management following this paradigm, but perhaps we can
ask Nicolas to give a presentation on this if people are interested.
Best regards and Happy Holidays,
Elisa
* What
are the different paradigms for roles for an ontology in
information or knowledge systems? As a terminology to be
carried by the information model? As part of the the
information model? As a means of validating the information
model? Reconciling multiple information models? Other? In
each case is it one model or several? If several, how are the
interfaces defined? Maintained?
* How
does this integration into use affect the life cycle? Can we
avoid too close a coupling between the ontology development
and
other developments so that one does not become a drag on
the other. In particular how to front loading development
with the work on ontology development that the applications
never get built. This has been a major issue in the Health
Informatics area, with enormous effort going into developing
resources such as SNOMED CT and the NCI Thesaurus with much
less attention to how they will be used (not to mention the
related front-loaded efforts in other areas of information
modelling, e.g. both HL7-v3 ).
Are these issues the Summit should address? (Or have I
just not looked int the right place or interpreted the
comments correctly)
Alan
-----------------------
Alan Rector
Professor of Medical Informatics
School of Computer Science
University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL, UK
TEL +44 (0) 161 275 6149/6188
FAX +44 (0) 161 275 6204
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