From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Barkmeyer, Edward J
Sent: Tuesday, January 28, 2014 1:14 PM
To: Ontology Summit 2014 discussion
Subject: Re: [ontology-summit] [Reusable Content] Characterizing or measuring reuse
Andrea,
There is a big difference between ‘opportunities for reuse’ and ‘reuse’. Reuse is a behavior. The so-called “opportunities” are just resources that could
be reused, but of themselves they are just available resources. A wealth of information doesn’t have a clear relationship to the use of that information, especially since some of it contradicts others. But I think your last question is the key one:
> Or, is content present but it is just very difficult to use/re-use?
Reuse is dependent on all of the following:
- the content is present (on the Internet/Web)
- the would-be re-user knows that the content is present, i.e., can find it
- the would-be re-user is motivated to find and examine the content
- the content is in a form suitable for the planned re-use, or can be “readily” converted to a useful form
- the would-be re-user knows how to convert the form, if necessary
- the content is consistent with the micro-theory adopted by the re-user
- the re-user is able to determine that the content is consistent with his/her theory
That all of these factors must be present makes it the nature of the beast that content is difficult to reuse.
What we tend to see is
- “reuse by direction”: Use this so that your model will be consistent with ours/hers.
- “reuse by social pressure”: I use the BFO because I know a lot of knowledge engineers who use/like it.
And of course, both of these lead to the Catch-22 problem: the content has to have been reused in order to be reused.
Murray Burke (DAML) once commented that upper ontologies would be reused because most knowledge engineers would be too lazy to roll their own. Experience suggests
that the latter is true, but the former is not necessarily a consequence.
In sum, I think reuse is both a technical problem and a social problem. (And if I knew how to overcome either, I would be rich, or something.
J)
-Ed
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?