Leo,
The comparison to software reuse is perhaps revealing. One of the problems with software reuse was that no one really knew what it meant. Many people thought reuse was about cutting and pasting source code.
Others thought it was about libraries. I recall a mid-80’s workshop near Lake Placid, NY where someone finally said in exasperation, “I brushed my teeth this morning. Did I reuse my toothbrush?” He got a laugh but no definitive response.
I can think of my own definitions of what reuse might mean in semantic technologies, but first I’d like to know of any existing work on the subject. I have seen plenty of papers on modular ontology design
and such things that talk about ontology reuse but never actually say what “reuse” means. It must be something more than an owl:imports assertion (right?). Whatever it is, it certainly isn’t the
full definition in Webster’s.
Steve Wartik
From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Obrst, Leo J.
Sent: Monday, January 27, 2014 4:43 PM
To: Ontology Summit 2014 discussion
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] [Reusable Content] Characterizing or measuring reuse
Hi, Andrea,
María Poveda-Villalón presented during Ontology Summit 2013, and talked about OOPS!: at least for OWL ontology validation; see:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2013_01_31.
One issue we may not have raised yet (and I don’t want to go too far off on a tangent) is that reuse is not just an issue for ontologies (and other kinds of
models, for that matter), but for software. Software reuse is not really that emphasized anymore (say, as opposed to a slight trend in the 1980s-1990s which promoted reuse). Consider object-oriented programming: one of the premises of OO was that, by having
program constructs “closer” to real-world objects and properties (and data abstraction, polymorphism), greater design clarity and reuse would be promoted.
However, in my experience, programming code is nearly always developed from scratch, perhaps reusing via (string-based) cut-and-paste. There are software libraries
(ostensibly certified) that some programmers do reuse and extend, and of course plugins/extensions based on open code (Firefox, Protégé, etc.) Service-Oriented Architecture has been a movement during the last 10+ years that tries to focus on individual reusable
services, and it has had some success.
The rise of maturity models in information technology and model-driven architecture tries to address software reuse, to some extent. But the “not-invented-here”
syndrome afflicts software, and perhaps also ontology development.
Thanks,
Leo
Other important questions in the "reusable content" arena are how to ascertain and improve the amount of reuse.
It "seems" that reuse is low, but there are many sites offering reusable content and therefore many opportunities for reuse. For example, in the Ontology Design Pattern (ODP) space, there are:
- W3C'S Ontology Engineering and Patterns Task Force (OEP) [1]
- Ontology Design Patterns org wiki [2]
In addition, there are foundational ontologies available, as discussed in the Upper Ontology Summit (2006) [4], as well as domain ontologies like FIBO.
So, does the wealth of information contradict the perception?
Or, is content present but it is just very difficult to use/re-use?
Perhaps we need to refine our engineering approaches and abilities to better find and evaluate reusable content? This is discussed in a paper by María Poveda-Villalón, Mari
Carmen Suárez-Figueroa and Asunción Gómez-Pérez [5] that I found quite interesting.
I personally would love to see a review and recommendation system put in place for ontologies, patterns, linked data models, etc. Is this something that we could achieve?