In the early 1990's Sam Adams, guru of object technology, in the (then) Object
Technology Practice, IBM Consulting Group, suggested the distinctions between
reuseable, reuseful and reused (successfully). My recall may not be perfect but
it went something like this.
Reuseable when disambiguated sufficiently to be referenced/selected without
confusion,
Reuseful when content and structure are consistent with the context in which it
is envisioned to participate, and
Reused (successfully) when it (as is or as modified) expanded the repertoire of
the 'system' in which it participated without fostering unacceptable unintended
consequences. (01)
Seems to me that any chunk of an ontology may be or may not be Reuseable
depending on whether the specification of its attributes (delimiters) is
sufficient. Further, that John Sowa's multifacted diamond structure specifies
those attributes. (02)
Seems to me that any chunk of an ontology may be reuseful when it is consistent
with the system principles of Progress Properties (an end state can be reached
from a current state in a finite number of transitions) and Safety Properties
(certain aspects of the system are invariant during the Progress. (03)
On Mar 12, 2014, at 11:11 PM, John F Sowa wrote: (04)
> Andrea, Jack, and Gary,
>
> I agree that a very underspecified definition can cover the many
> senses of a word. But it adds very little information.
>
> AW
>> How about the following for our basic definitions:
>> * Reusable - "Capable of being used again" (from WordNet)
>> This begs the question of what makes semantic content
>> "capable" of being used again.
>
> As you said, it doesn't answer the question. It relates the word
> 'reuse' to the word 'use', which has very little meaning in itself.
> If I say "I used X", that means I performed some action in which X was
> involved as a tool, a resource, a part, etc. That doesn't say much.
>
> If I say "I reused X", it says even less. I can reuse a DVD disk
> as a coaster for my coffee cup. That's similar to Jack's example
> of reusing an article of clothing.
>
> AW
>> * Interoperability - "Ability of systems or organizations to work
>> together" (from Wikipedia)
>
> That's another underspecified definition. Computer systems have
> been interoperating from the earliest days. Whenever some human
> carried a deck of punched cards from computer A and loaded it in
> the card reader of computer B, the two computers interoperated.
> A high-speed line can make the interoperation faster, but there's
> no difference in principle.
>
> AW
>> There was a thread on the public-lod mail list that specifically
>> asked for this, "Evaluation of ontology reuse choices in real-world
>> scenarios" (Feb 20). Unfortunately, there were no specific answers.
>
> That's the critical point. Scenarios and case-histories get into
> the details. It's too bad that there were no specific answers in
> that case. I suspect that the many different partial answers were
> so diverse that it was hard to find useful generalizations.
>
> GBC
>>> Haven't we made progress on understanding several areas of semantic
>>> relations that can be reused? Distinctions among different types
>>> of Part relations come to mind and are post-Aristotle.
>
> I didn't summarize all the discoveries of the Sumerians, Egyptians,
> Chinese, Indians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Indians, medieval Scholastics,
> Renaissance, etc. Aristotle most certainly did analyze the many kinds
> of part relations. As I said, Wilkins' ontology (17th c) was as good
> or better than many ontologies on the WWW.
>
> Roget's Thesaurus (19th c) is still widely used -- and it has a better
> coverage of adjectives and adverbs than WordNet. I suggest that you
> compare the two. Take any sample of words (nouns, verbs, adjectives,
> and adverbs) and look at the "concept neighborhoods" linked to them
> in both Roget's and WordNet. It's very easy to compare them:
>
> 1. For Roget's, take any word and type it into the following demo:
> http://www.ketlab.org.uk/roget.html
>
> 2. For WordNet, type the same word to
> http://www.ketlab.org.uk/wordnet.html
>
> You might start with the verb 'explore'. Then compare 'happy' and
> 'happiness' on both systems. For software and documentation about FCA
> (Formal Concept Analysis), see http://www.upriss.org.uk/fca/fca.html
>
> AW
>> I agree that we do have common semantics already that need to be
>> highlighted - part, dependency, generalization/specialization, events...
>
> Yes, but... There is a huge difference between the kinds of detailed,
> very precise ontologies needed for designing an airplane and the looser
> ontologies needed for answering a Jeopardy question. LOD is somewhere
> closer to Jeopardy than to airplane design.
>
> AW
>> All of these semantics need more than just a definition and encoding
>> in RDF or OWL. They need the backing tooling, metadata and repository
>> that we have highlighted.
>
> I certainly agree with the first sentence. On the second, I believe
> that current research is just scratching the surface of what needs
> to be done.
>
> John
>
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