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Re: [ontology-summit] [ReusableContent] Partitioning the problem

To: "Ontology Summit 2014 discussion" <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "doug foxvog" <doug@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2014 17:30:35 -0500
Message-id: <72eeba1b78017553c21fb419b84b7f78.squirrel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
+1
-- doug f.    (01)

On Sat, February 1, 2014 18:59, Amanda Vizedom wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 6:01 PM, Ali SH <asaegyn+out@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Dear Amanda, Kingsley and David,
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Amanda Vizedom
>> <amanda.vizedom@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Your proposed solution - as best I can tell, to choose one target set
>>> of
>>> humans and make the (meant for machine consumption) URIs (or even
>>> names!)
>>> understandable to them, while ignoring the polysemy-tolerant,
>>> built-for-natural-language labeling features of the ontology language,
>>> is
>>> inherently antithetical to reuse (including use over time).
>>>
>>
>> I don't believe David is saying this. I sympathize with his conundrum.
>> He
>> isn't saying that the human readable URI's are intended to exactly
>> denote
>> the semantics of what is represented in the ontology.  Rather, that
>> people
>> who are using these URI's to build applications, in the form of code or
>> queries riding on top of the ontologies have more difficulty if they are
>> anchored in a completely opaque naming system.
>>
>
> In my experience, that just isn't true.
>
> Ignore that examples of really long and confusing identifiers have been
> thrown around, here. Much shorter and simpler character strings can be
> used
> for IDs within an ontology. Sure, use namespaces or other mechanism to
> localize to the particular ontology (or microtheory, or ...?); that's
> great. 6 hexadecimal char strings, for example, are well within the
> capability of most coders to compare. I am relatively poor at number and
> non-word recall, and I found one such system, quite large, to be easy to
> work with. Did I memorize what concepts each of these strings corresponded
> to? No; whether I was working on the ontology directly, browsing it,
> looking stuff up in it, querying, developing pattern-matching code that
> used the ontology, debugging weird test results from and indexing run, or
> what have you, the hex code ID could (usually was, by default) shown
> *with*
> a pref label for my language. Folks working in extending the French
> lexicalization or doing QA testing for a francophone localization could
> have the default show pref label in (fr) or some localization thereof, for
> example. So I might see 4G61XS (dog) and Claude might see 4G61XS (chien)
> in
> the indexer results or while browsing the ontology. If we were developing
> rules or tests and couldn't remember the name of the concept we wanted
> was,
> I could search on "dog" and compare the returns (multiple, since labels
> aren't unique) to find the right one, and Claude could do the same
> searching on "chien." Both of us would be reminded and motivated to check
> the other "dog"/"chien" matches.  In my experience, that apparent burden
> in
> fact results in a greater efficiency and accuracy; without that check, and
> with a suggestive name or label-only view, the rate at which people guess
> or assume and use the wrong one is high enough to cause a lot of extra
> work.
>
>
>> His example with the SPARQL queries is spot on, and something I've run
>> into as well. When queries are written using completely opaque URI's,
>> the
>> task of maintaining, debugging and updating them is significantly
>> complicated, leading to more opportunities for errors.
>>
>
> I understand, but I think it is mostly a tooling problem. The tools do not
> use the appropriate formal language features. Humans shouldn't be writing
> or debugging SPARQL queries with only the concept ID visible, whether it
> is
> opaque or suggestive. Either way, there is extra lookup (out of the
> cognitive task space) and a greater likelihood of error than is really
> tenable. Unfortunately, that is mostly the state of the art in open/COTS
> tools, but the way to fix it isn't to make the IDs more suggestive (and
> conducive to error); it's to make the tools use the human-oriented
> features
> of the language when interfacing with humans. BTW, I specified state of
> the
> art in *COTS* tools, because I've seen a number of proprietary tools,
> developed for use within an company only, that don't make this same error.
> I'm perpetually frustrated that we don't have the same level of tooling in
> the open-source or COTS worlds. But it is not a coincidence that the
> companies in question have done well in developing semantic enterprise or
> web systems with those ontologies as components. They take their
> ontologies, and the processes concerning them, rather seriously.
>
>
>> If I've understood David's point correctly -- the same way that software
>> developers employ useful NL *analogues* for the variable / class names
>> to
>> make the code more readable, ontologists should consider using similarly
>> somewhat accessible labels. As someone who has had to debug SPARQL
>> queries
>> written using esoteric naming systems, the fact that those terms had
>> "pref-labels" in a multitude of language did not help one iota. I had to
>> constantly look up what the term referred, and it increased the
>> debugging
>> time by perhaps an order of magnitude.
>>
>> As I suggested in a previous email, there's a balance to be struck,
>> since
>> a pure linguistic ID can indeed lead to unintended or hopeful semantics.
>> But something like:
>>
>> human.n.05
>>
>> is readable to a human, and also clearly not intended to be interpreted
>> naiively. One can *still* use labels (a la SKOS) to display different
>> terms (e.g. *homme*) when presenting such concepts to SME's or other
>> targeted audiences, but when one is building applications using the
>> ontology identifiers, having something like human.n.05 vs RD54383 is
>> much
>> easier to follow the logic and debug.
>>
>
> That's in between, I think. You will still have to look up which
> human-related concept that is, and to Claude or someone else they may be
> equally opaque. I still don't see the advantage over having an IDE, or
> parts thereof that (a) shows you a prefLabel along with ID, according to
> your settings.
>
>
>> As Simon and Ed alluded to, our brains have developed ways for holding
>> various referents in our heads. We detect and utilize name patterns
>> based
>> on the shape and length of words. When the naming system follows an
>> esoteric style, we don't have the ability to use these facilities,
>> leading
>> to potential errors and slower work.
>>
>
> True, but it is still the case that intelligible to some is opaque to
> others, and that suggestive often means giving rise to misuse. OWL has the
> built-in capabilities to give us precision and developer-appropriate
> language suggestions together. It's perfectly feasible to build efficient
> development tools that do so; one can even get a little fancier and
> connect
> tools to ontology to allow, for example, using the language part to look
> at
> alternatives without leaving the cognitive space. I know this is possible
> because I've used them. But the majority  of tools, and all the open or
> COTS ones I know of, just haven't had this kind of Human/cognitive
> interface attention given to them.
>
> I just don't think the solution is to treat the ontology language as more
> impoverished than it really is. We know there is far to go in improving
> tools, anyway. I'd say that one of the improvements should be to make
> tools
> that use the existing support for co-existing human-readability and
> machine-uniqueness.
>
> Amanda
>
>
>
>
>>
>> --
>>
>>
>> (•`'·.¸(`'·.¸(•)¸.·'´)¸.·'´•) .,.,
>>
>>
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