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

To: Ontology Summit 2014 discussion <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Jack Ring <jring7@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 14:41:22 -0700
Message-id: <80C3F7E3-9AB0-45C8-8DC2-FA7FCB990E37@xxxxxxxxx>
John,
Thanks, as usual, for the tremendous jerk (as in increased acceleration, of 
course).
Jack Ring
On Jan 21, 2014, at 2:04 PM, John F Sowa wrote:    (01)

> Dear Matthew and Ali,
> 
> I agree with the importance of Matthew's questions.  I also agree
> with Ali's answers.  But I'd like to make different suggestions.
> 
>> 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...
> 
> Yes, but I don't believe that the overwhelming majority of developers
> will ever understand ontologies -- either well or poorly.
> 
>> 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....
> 
> I agree.  But I believe that we need *radically* different tools.
> The SMEs should do their work in *their* preferred languages and
> notations.  They should *never* be asked to learn anybody else's
> notations, conventions, or interfaces.
> 
>> 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...
> 
> I agree.  But the solution is to get the information from the same
> sources and tools that the SMEs themselves read, write, and use.
> 
>> Formal, computational ontologies in general are not well developed...
>> Bindings into alternative reasoning algorithms and evaluation frameworks
>> are still quite crude, and require a lot of wheel re-invention...
> 
> Those bindings should be made to the tools and resources the SMEs
> are already using to do their job.  Any necessary ontologies should
> *help* the SMEs to do their work better and faster.
> 
>> 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...
> 
> I agree.  But those are symptoms of not having the right tools.
> 
>> while the Semantic Web understanding of ontologies is useful for
>> certain classes of applications, it is not well suited to many other
>> applications...  many interventions I've seen don't fully take into
>> account the sociological factors of the solution...a broad class
>> of potential ontology based applications can be achieved with
>> a non-ontological approach faster and cheaper.
> 
> More symptoms of inadequate tools.
> 
> Fundamental principle:  Ontology tools should *reduce* the expense
> by enabling SMEs to accomplish more in less time.  The ontologies
> should be a *by-product* of the SMEs' normal work.
> 
> Recommendation:  The ontology summit should devote more attention to
> cutting-edge research than to incremental improvements on inadequate
> tools.  Some suggestions:
> 
>  1. See the slides and publications by the Aristo Project at AI2:
>     http://www.allenai.org/TemplateGeneric.aspx?contentId=12
> 
>  2. The IBM Watson project is also doing research on deriving
>     knowledge from the same kinds of resources as AI2.
> 
>  3. Tom Mitchell at Carnegie Mellon developed the Never-Ending Language
>     Learner (NELL): http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/index.php .  Or see
> 
> 
>http://wamc.org/post/dr-tom-mitchell-carnegie-mellon-university-language-learning-computer
> 
>  4. For the past few years, I've mentioned Cyc as an important
>     project that is doing important research with the world's
>     largest formal ontology.
> 
>  5. And from time to time, I cite the VivoMind work.  For example,
>     http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/goal7.pdf
> 
> I won't claim that these projects will solve all the problems tomorrow.
> But I believe that tools based on some combination of these methods will
> solve the problems raised by Matthew's questions.  They'll get better
> results faster than trying to "educate" developers about ontology.
> 
> John
> 
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