Dear Colleagues,
This is the first of a series of emails I intend to write to reflect on the
excellent session we had last Thursday. If you haven't were unable to attend
and haven't had the chance to catch up, the archive is here:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2013_02_07 (01)
The session was particularly focussed on methodologies for integrating
ontologies. These tend to be large, but relatively light weight ontologies
aimed at providing a common language across a number of applications so that
information can be shared among them and gathered from them and compared
sensibly. Integrating ontologies typically have large and distributed
development teams, which makes the consistency that is necessary for success
a particular challenge. (02)
I was particularly struck by one slide in Mike Bennett's presentation that
made the point about the balance between genius and methodology.
Essentially, two approaches to a range of problems are that you can hire
lots of very bright people ad ruthlessly reinvent when you have problems, or
you can apply a methodology and an improvement process and grind your way to
a better place. (03)
One thing that is for sure is that in the general development and extension
of a large integrating ontology, the last thing you want is lots of bright
people inventing new ways to do the same thing. What you want are relatively
tight controls so that when something new is added, it ends up being done
the same way with the same result, no matter who in the development team
does it. At least one reason for this is that if two different people do
identify the same requirement, and try to add something to meet that
requirement, they will then discover what each other is doing, thus avoiding
duplication. (04)
That is not to say that there is no room for bright people being creative in
the development of integrating ontologies, the methodology itself needs to
be developed and adjusted as weaknesses are found, but you do not want
people being creative about how they add another type of pump or another
disease of the lung to the ontology. (05)
Regards (06)
Matthew West
Information Junction
Tel: +44 1489 880185
Mobile: +44 750 3385279
Skype: dr.matthew.west
matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.informationjunction.co.uk/
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/ (07)
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