Hi Matthew, (01)
Just wanted to pick out one section of what you said below: (02)
MW:
What are the tradeoffs between expressiveness vs. pragmatics? (03)
Two kinds of ontology I find have different requirements. (04)
The first sort I would call a descriptive ontology, where the purpose is to
as accurate as possible to how some domain is, not so much for reasoning,
but for documentation. In this situation expressiveness is everything. If
you cannot say something that is true, then that is a severe limitation. (05)
The second sort is aimed at solving a specific problem. This is likely a
subset of some descriptive ontology (if such exists) where some specific
constraints apply, which may enable more efficient reasoning to take place,
or indeed make reasoning possible/practical. (06)
There is only a problem, in my view, if we try to insist that there is only
one type of ontology for a domain, rather than potentially more than one,
with relationships between them.
/MW (07)
This is very true. The two can be complementary if one uses the right language
to describe them, but that's been quite difficult to do. We had a great
semantics event this week at the OMG meetings, and our keynote speaker (Linda
Powell from the Office of financial Research at the US Treasury) described how
the lack of a common language across the financial industry is a billion dollar
problem. This was without mentioning reasoning at all. Reasoning based
applications have huge promise for the future especially in risk and compliance
- maybe it's the million dollar opportunity. Meanwhile something like OWL or
anything which allows you to frame meaning in some clear logical formalism has
to be a much better solution to the common "language" problem than some of the
more word-based alternatives. What the business thinks of as the language or
vocabulary problem is really a need for a formalized representation of the
world of real business things - an ontology in that sense of the word. But if
you use OWL as the best language to try and capture that knowledge, a lot of
people will assume that you are showing them something you had intended to run
in a reasoning application. There's a mismatch of expectations because the same
modeling language may be appropriate for both of the requirements you have
described above. (08)
So maybe the issue is not merely one of bottlenecks, but of language. (09)
Mike (010)
--
Mike Bennett
Head of Semantics and Standards
EDM Council
Tel: +44 20 7917 9522
Cell: +44 7721 420 730
www.edmcouncil.org
Semantics Repository: www.hypercube.co.uk/edmcouncil (011)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontology-summit-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Matthew West
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2014 6:00 AM
To: ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ontology-summit] [Bottlenecks] Questions from Session 2 (012)
Dear Colleagues, (013)
During the last session Track C session on Bottlenecks in Ontology
Engineering, we were asked some questions. I repeat these below to solicit
your answers to these questions, and I provide some of my own where I have
some. (014)
Here are the questions: (015)
1. What are the lessons learned from in-the-wild ontology engineering
projects? (016)
2. How do challenges related to cultural and motivational issues
relate to technical issues, e.g., tool support? (017)
3. How to get community buy-in? (018)
4. What are the tradeoffs between expressiveness vs. pragmatics? (019)
5. Who will develop all the ontologies we would ideally need? (020)
6. What is the role of crowd-sourcing? (021)
7. What is the state-of-the art with respect to quality control? (022)
8. How is the industry addressing ontology engineering bottlenecks and
what are the technological solutions available on the market today? (023)
9. How much (deep) semantics do customers really need? (024)
I'm going to pick a couple of these: (025)
What are the tradeoffs between expressiveness vs. pragmatics? (026)
Two kinds of ontology I find have different requirements. (027)
The first sort I would call a descriptive ontology, where the purpose is to
as accurate as possible to how some domain is, not so much for reasoning,
but for documentation. In this situation expressiveness is everything. If
you cannot say something that is true, then that is a severe limitation. (028)
The second sort is aimed at solving a specific problem. This is likely a
subset of some descriptive ontology (if such exists) where some specific
constraints apply, which may enable more efficient reasoning to take place,
or indeed make reasoning possible/practical. (029)
There is only a problem, in my view, if we try to insist that there is only
one type of ontology for a domain, rather than potentially more than one,
with relationships between them. (030)
Who will develop all the ontologies we would ideally need? (031)
For any domain, there ought to be an identifiable authoritative source. I
would hope that those authoritative sources would eventually understand
their responsibility to develop these ontologies. In many cases these
authoritative sources will be public administration bodies, or
standardisation bodies. This would at least be better than several bodies
developing, say, Unit of Measure ontologies, as is the case at present. (032)
What is the state-of-the art with respect to quality control? (033)
There are some things that tools can help with, like logical consistency,
but overall fitness for purpose is a human endeavour, and likely will be for
some time. I hope with increasing computer assistance. (034)
How much (deep) semantics do customers really need? (035)
Not much. The priority is identity (same name (ID) for the same thing across
those that need to share information). (036)
Regards (037)
Matthew West (038)
Wandering Glider (039)
<http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/wandering-glider>
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/wandering-glider (040)
Hon Sec MOCRA (041)
<http://www.mocra-sailing.co.uk/> http://www.mocra-sailing.co.uk/ (042)
+44 750 338 5279 (043)
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