Re: [ontology-summit] [Bottlenecks] Identifying Bottlenecks in Ontology

[Ali SH <asaegyn+out@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Matthew,

Here are some reflections based on experiences from working on 4 projects and 8 different corporate cultures to design and deploy ontology-based solutions.

On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 4:33 AM, Matthew West <dr.matthew.west@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

-          What is it that takes a lot of time and effort?

Broadly speaking, education and team buy-in.  Most people don't understand ontologies well, and getting the supporting team to buy-in and build towards the success of the project can become time consuming and distracting. You really need strong leadership that is committed to project.  I've also found the Semantic Web understanding of ontologies to actually be a hindrance for certain classes of applications. Re-education in terms of what is actually possible is sometimes an additional obstacle.

 

-          What is it that is very expensive?

Access to SME's. The higher the skill and importance of the SME, the more difficult it is to get their time. Also, the lack of sophisticated ontology tooling also means that significant effort needs to be directed towards building appropriate supporting software infrastructure.

 

-          What is it that is held up because of a lack of scarce resources?

Generally, ontology development is bottlenecked because of access to SME's and access to software developers that need to provide adequate infrastructure. Moreover, ontology deployment when using functionality beyond the SemWeb stack is also hindered. Formal, computational ontologies in general are not well developed. For example, if you want to deploy an ontology-based application that can reason on natural language questions such as "Who is standing behind you?", "Who passed through this corridor in the last X hours?" and so on, you don't necessarily want to use a symbolic reasoner. Bindings into alternative reasoning algorithms and evaluation frameworks are still quite crude, and require a lot of wheel re-invention. This both slows down design-deployment time, drives up costs, and increases the overall risks of the project.

-          Why is it that ontological approaches are not taken when they
could/should be?

There are a number of factors. Sometimes, the long pay-off time makes these interventions either riskier, or outside the expected pay-off for the decision-maker, and hence less attractive. Secondly, while the Semantic Web understanding of ontologies is useful for certain classes of applications, it is not well suited to many other applications. This can make it difficult to communicate the potential of ontologies, especially so if a culture has been "indoctrinated" with the SemWeb understanding of ontologies - in these cases, it is an uphill battle to get them to realize the value of a broader understanding of what ontologies can do. The recent miniseries on Rules, Reasoning and LP demonstrated this disconnect well, whereby one community differentiates between axioms and rules, while the other community does not restrict itself to considering "pure axioms" vs "rules".  Thirdly, many interventions I've seen don't fully take into account the sociological factors of the solution - without a cogent understanding of the culture in which in the technology intervention is taking place, there are many opportunities for misaligned expectations, yielding in gaps in implementation or improperly used technologies. Fourthly, a broad class of potential ontology based applications can be achieved with a non-ontological approach faster and cheaper. We assert that the long term value proposition in this instance is lower than a "proper" solution, but demonstrating and clearly communicating the opportunity cost can be difficult. Lastly, and this complements the previous point, there is a dearth of popular / well-known successful ontology-based solutions. Whereas the benefit of say a CRM or a DB is well known, in many instances, those involved in ontology need to reiterate the value proposition nearly from scratch.

Hope this helps,

Ali

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