Dear Andrea,
You wrote:
I do recognize that a lot of work went into FIBO to create smaller, more reusable content. In fact, that was one of the positives that I highlighted in my presentation yesterday [1]. It was straightforward to find concepts and the annotation was amazing!
But, I did find that for many of the more "advanced" topics, there were imports of most of the FIBO Foundational Ontology. For example, People.rdf imported Organizations (and FormalOrganizations), Locations (and Countries and Addresses), Goals, etc. So, the more interesting topic ended up being rather "inclusive."
Might there be a way to modularize this even more?
I’m wondering if you are chasing your tail here, but I’m also not sure if I understand exactly what you are proposing. So let me start by asking: what size do you think a module should be?
If I look at my own experience, we opted to make ISO 15926-2 an integrated data model. It is only 200 entity types, so it is not very large, and we could have modularized it. However, we considered this rather pointless, not because the modules were tightly bound together, but that to do anything significant you had to use most of what would have been the core modules. Just to give one example, one of the modules would certainly have been about signs. This is an approximately 15-20 entity type section of the model which says that things can be represented by signs (names, descriptions, definitions, …) and that there are useful classifications of these from utterances of names, to names to file formats etc.
Now what do you have that you don’t want to give names and descriptions of? So even though this makes a neat module, there is not much point in having it separate from the rest of the data model, since you are always going to need it. The same is true of about half the entity types in the Part 2 data model (and nothing stops you ignoring the ones you don’t need anyway).
On the other hand, when we were developing Shell’s downstream (oil tanker to gas station) data model, we certainly did divide the data model (some 1700 entity types) into what we called subject areas (some 20+ of them). The core (essentially a subset of ISO 15926-2) was included in all the other models, and there were some other mid-level subject areas like person and organization, and location, that were also widely used (and a good thing too) and specifically developed to support that reuse, but the subject areas that looked at supporting specific parts of the business tended not to be imported by other subject areas, so there was something of a hierarchy of these subject areas, with subject areas mostly being imported from above in the hierarchy.
We limited the subject areas to around 200 entity types, with many much smaller. The reason for this limit is that it seems to be about what one person can hold in their mind without getting lost.
So how does that compare with what you are looking to achieve?
Regards
Matthew West
Information Junction
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From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Andrea Westerinen
Sent: 24 January 2014 22:29
To: Ontology Summit 2014 discussion
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] [ReusableContent] Reuse of Linked Data vis-a-vis Reuse of Ontologies
Elisa,
I do recognize that a lot of work went into FIBO to create smaller, more reusable content. In fact, that was one of the positives that I highlighted in my presentation yesterday [1]. It was straightforward to find concepts and the annotation was amazing!
But, I did find that for many of the more "advanced" topics, there were imports of most of the FIBO Foundational Ontology. For example, People.rdf imported Organizations (and FormalOrganizations), Locations (and Countries and Addresses), Goals, etc. So, the more interesting topic ended up being rather "inclusive."
Might there be a way to modularize this even more?
Hi Andrea and all,
I agree wholeheartedly with your suggestions, below. For the work we do at OMG, we are trying very hard to create smaller, reusable ontology "modules" for FIBO, and to make them understandable, not adding any axioms that we can't support for a wide variety of applications, and not including any that the SMEs can't agree on. We also use a couple of other tests for modularization - whether or not a concept is useful independently, and whether or not its definition might evolve independently, which seem to be holding up in the testing we've done so far on the early FIBO specifications. Your thoughts on defining axioms based on context are similar to an approach I use for client work with segregating axioms by use case. I wish more practitioners would think along these lines.
Thanks for weighing in,
Elisa
On 1/24/2014 1:06 PM, Andrea Westerinen wrote:
One of the questions proposed in Track A (Common, Reusable Semantic Content) asks whether the reuse problems (and perhaps their solutions) are different in the Linked Data and ontology spaces.
Certainly, the uses of the two technologies are different ... as Linked Data is about the "links" and supplying relatively simple semantic annotations and new links ... but ontologies come down to T-boxes (more formal class, relationship and/or axiomatic definitions) and A-boxes (instance definitions). It is much easier to reuse small, targeted schemas that define Linked Data and various annotations (such as schema.org) than it is to reuse (typically much larger) foundational or domain-specific ontologies.
In terms of time spent "getting up to speed", small, targeted definitions always win. However, it is also much more likely to be able to do reasoning over (and more complex analysis of) ontologies and A-boxes. And, one can more easily combine multiple ontologies (for example, with constructs such as OWL's sameAs, differentFrom, disjointWith, ...) than to combine (or reuse) multiple Linked Data schemas. In my experience, I have seen developers typically pick one schema and just stick with that.
Taking a lesson from the Linked Data world, I would posit that the characteristics that make Linked Data schemas more friendly and reusable could be applied to ontologies. That would argue for:
* Smaller, more modular, targeted ontology fragments
* Separation of semantic (class and relationship) definitions from the axioms that prescribe them
* (Perhaps) Definition of a context in which the axioms apply (and the assumption that there may be more than 1 context and therefore more than one set of axioms)
Another lesson that the ontology world must learn is that the fragments must be vetted, have real uses and sponsors, and not devolve to multitudes of overlapping and (sometimes) contradictory proposals. (I think that the biomed BioPortal community has done a good job with this.)
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