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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