Pavithra, Keep in mind that commonality implies differences, otherwise there would be no need for it. Across what differences is the ontology (or anything else) common? Those differences might be across a domain, a population, an institution, multiple institutions in an industry, a country, a neighborhood, language, or across a multiplicity of these types of scope. Those differences are the primary driver of requirements for whatever is to be common. While it is, indeed, common, to focus on commonality across some almost always implicit differences, I believe a better approach is to focus on the differences across which one is attempting to establish a bridge via commonality. Explicitly focusing on the differences that the commonality has to support provides a higher level of assurance that the common solution will actually be adopted and will support the needs of the diverse community/scope that it is targeted at. In simple terms, what scope of differences does the common solution support, and possibly more importantly, what differences does it not support/encompass? Remember also that relying on commonality can be perilous for interoperability. It means that encountering some entity that does not share that commonality will likely result in a breakdown in interoperability, possibly without even being aware that a breakdown has occurred (at least until some bad consequence becomes evident down the road). It’s certainly more convenient to be able to rely on commonality – no discovery process or negotiation process is required. And some level of commonality is unavoidable – or it would not be possible to do discovery and negotiation. But it’s not a general or very scalable solution. In a dynamic environment it is usually better to recognize and embrace diversity in the environment and the concomitant need to be explicit about one’s domain/institutional scope and the specific domain standards and frames of reference that one is using. Interacting with another entity should then involve some discovery and negotiation process to establish the level of interoperability required to achieve the respective purposes of the interacting entities (or to determine that those purposes are not pragmatically achievable). In effect, we do this today at system requirements definition and design time when we select data models, ontologies, and specific languages and protocol standards based on a quasi-static assessment of the other systems and institutions with which we might want the system to interact. But we rarely provide for this discovery and negotiation process to occur after the system is operating. Interestingly, domain ontologies can be a useful tool in developing capabilities for dynamic discovery and negotiation for interoperability. But such ontologies will necessarily focus on bridging differences likely to be encountered in some functional or institutional domain. Hans From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pavithra
Sent: Sunday, March 31, 2013 12:29 PM
To: Ontology Summit 2013 discussion
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] HC-05 Ontology of Ontology Evaluation - Ontology Usage We have discussed about Ontology usage in the past in this forum. However since we discussed it again today, I like to open the floor for further discussion..
I have listed a snippet from article written by Stanfords Natalya Noy .. Why develop an Ontology.?
Those five things listed are the general basis for usage. and the first indicates "To share common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents". In an increasingly digitized world it is "one of the" practical reasons why we develop Ontology in modern days. And I quote "one of the" and not one and only reason. In generic sense, it is to organize information is a structured manner, however eventually it all gets digitized.
Thank you,
Pavithra
An ontology defines a common vocabulary for researchers who need to share information in a domain. It includes machine-interpretable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and relations among them. Why would someone want to develop an ontology? Some of the reasons are: � To share common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents � To enable reuse of domain knowledge � To make domain assumptions explicit � To separate domain knowledge from the operational knowledge � To analyze domain knowledge Sharing common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents is one of the more common goals in developing ontologies (Musen 1992; Gruber 1993). For example, suppose several different Web sites contain medical information or provide medical e-commerce services. If these Web sites share and publish the same underlying ontology of the terms they all use, then computer agents can extract and aggregate information from these different sites. The agents can use this aggregated information to answer user queries or as input data to other applications. |
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