Re: [ontology-summit] [Reusable Content] Characterizing or measuring reu

[Gary Berg-Cross <gbergcross@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks everyone for making this a useful discussion of aspects of Ontology Reuse issue.  Below I add only a few comments to Ed's response to connect it to some of the chat on the Track A session 1.

>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?

Ok this distinction between Opportunity for Resources and Reuse Behavior provides a larger frame for discussion.

I must say that I when I first think of reuse I am thinking of content reuse as in the title of Track A "Reusable Semantic Content"

 

Reuse is dependent on all of the following:

- the content is present (on the Internet/Web)

Yes, this I think of this as a presupposition for  Access and accessibility.  The content must be discoverable and then accessible.  

- 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

I just observe that if the community makes an effort to store topical ontologies in repositories with good search capabilities this would make finding a suitable candidate more likely. 

- the content is in a form suitable for the planned re-use, or can be “readily” converted to a useful form

What about the idea of generalizing this a bit to include the idea of adapting the content?  Converting it

sounds a bit like a rule like transformation and it might be more complicated than that but still useful to do this.

We did have an example from Pascal's Hitzler's presentation (slide 9) Mike Bennett noted that his ODP of Event turned out to be identical to the one in FIBO except we refer to the concepts of place and time, rather than strings presentation. But then he noted there were more changes needed:

Place need not be spatial - there are events which occur at a virtual place, e.g. a security is issued on the Global Bonds Market.

- 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

Yes, I guess that Mike Bennett was matching up micro-theories on event in his comment.

- the re-user is able to determine that the content is consistent with his/her theory

Yes, I guess that we might look for structural consistency which was perhaps handled in the conversion process mentioned previously, the logical consistency (check with a reasoner?) and consistency with the user's conceptualization. 

I am aware of some thought on these from the work of  Ljiljana Stojanovic on Ontology evolution. 

Methods and Tools for Ontology Evolution. PhD thesis, University of

Karlsruhe, 2004

Gary Berg-Cross, Ph.D.  

gbergcross@xxxxxxxxx     

http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?GaryBergCross

NSF INTEROP Project  

http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0955816

SOCoP Executive Secretary

Knowledge Strategies    

Potomac, MD

240-426-0770

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 1:14 PM, Barkmeyer, Edward J <edward.barkmeyer@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

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

 

 

From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Andrea Westerinen
Sent: Monday, January 27, 2014 1:54 PM
To: Ontology Summit 2014 discussion
Subject: [ontology-summit] [Reusable Content] Characterizing or measuring reuse

 

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]

 - ODP Public Catalog [3]

 

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? 

 

 

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/OEP/

[2] http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/Main_Page

[3] http://www.gong.manchester.ac.uk/odp/html/index.html

[4] http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UpperOntologySummit

[5] http://oa.upm.es/5432/1/REUSING_ONTOLOGY_DESIGN_PATTERNS_IN_A_CONTEXT_ONTOLOGY_NETWORK.pdf

 

--

Andrea Westerinen

T: 425.891.8407

arwesterinen@xxxxxxxxx or andreaw@xxxxxxxxxxx

http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?AndreaWesterinen

organizingknowledge.blogspot.com

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