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Re: [uom-ontology-std] UoM ontology standard - a proposed program of wor

To: edbark@xxxxxxxx, uom-ontology-std <uom-ontology-std@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Mike Bennett <mbennett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:51:03 +0100
Message-id: <4A5B57E7.3080301@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Hi Ed,    (01)

On your point (1), that's more or less exactly what I have done, 
following the excellent standardisation of this for OWL from the OMG. 
Hence my curiousity.    (02)

On (2) I think we may differ. However a detailed exploration of that 
would be a paper I've been intending to write up as soon as I get a chance.    (03)

I'm certainly happy to put my name down for some effort in this direction.    (04)

Best regards,    (05)

Mike    (06)

Ed Barkmeyer wrote:
> Mike Bennett wrote:
>
>   
>> That sounds great. Can you generate it from the output of a UML model? 
>> How does it compare with what I've done at 
>> www.hypercube.co.uk/edmcouncil which aims to fulfil that exact same 
>> requirement from within UML but is by no means perfect?
>>
>> Mike
>>
>>     
>
>   
>>>> [EB] The trick is not to be excessively geeky.  My late mentor, Dr. Selden
>>>> Stewart, once observed that all modeling languages are BLAs -- boxes,
>>>> lines and annotations.  As long as you stick with class boxes/balls,
>>>> association/property lines/wires, and text labels (annotations), you
>>>> don't violate the "anti-technical" prejudices of "business persons".
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> [MW] OK. If that is your objective then I will throw what was originally (as
>>> far as I know) the CDIF (CASE Data Interchange Format) notation into the
>>> ring. This consists of named boxes for classes/entity types and named arrows
>>> for relationships/relations, where the direction of the arrow tells you
>>> which direction to read the relationship name in (and nothing else). So you
>>> could have:
>>>
>>>  A --part of--> B, or
>>>  A <--has part-- B
>>>
>>> My experience is that this notation is not only very simple, but very easy
>>> for anyone to read.
>>>       
>
> Indeed.  Three points:
>
> (1) This is essentially the notation one sees in Protegé.  And you can 
> clearly generate a very similar notation with a UML tool, by
>    a) making one end of the association non-navigable, and
>    b) naming the other, or naming the association by the verb
> This is in fact common practice for people modeling Java in UML.  The 
> advantage of UML tools, including some free ones, over Powerpoint and 
> Visio is that they generate a (more or less) standard machine-readable 
> XML form, which can be converted to OWL, for example, with some readily 
> hacked tool.  (I already have 3 or 4 such things.)  The advantage of 
> Protegé is that it can generate OWL and a proprietary axiomatic text 
> form (which we could also hack). (Student projects)
>
> (2) I stand by my claim that the audience for the would-be standard is 
> knowledge engineers, not business people.  If we lose sight of that, we 
> will find ourselves making a weak and deliberately inaccurate ontology, 
> because "business people don't understand concept X that way" or 
> "business people won't understand such a complex model".  (I have 
> recently worked with a group like that, and it wasted two years of my 
> time.)  So the graphical model is a sketch of the ontological 
> relationships, which should be _correct_, but not necessarily 
> "complete".  We must stand by the Einstein razor: "We should make things 
> as simple as possible, but no simpler."
>
> (3) Matt doesn't mention the CDIF notation for "subtype"/subsumption.
> This is a foundational concept in OWL, and it is very important to 
> modeling measurement concepts.  In particular, every 'measurement unit' 
> is_a 'quantity'.  I would be wary of a notation like:
>    measurement-unit -- is a --> quantity
> because it makes the notation ambiguous.  'is_a' is a class-to-class 
> relationship, rather than an instance-to-instance relationship (like 
> 'part of').  It models an axiom, not just a relation.  That is:
>    A -- is part of --> B
> models a relation "is part of" whose domain is things that satisfy 
> relation (class) A, and whose range is things that satisfy relation B -- 
> a vocabulary item.  It has two free variables.  Whereas,
>    A -- is a --> B
> models a proposition, a statement: Every A is a B.  Formally,
>    (forall x) (if (A x) (B x))
> It has no free variables.  And the model asserts that proposition, 
> making it an axiom.
> So I would object to overuse of the arrow notation, if it leads to such 
> an ambiguity.
>
> And finally, I did say that we need a language-selection committee.  I 
> didn't volunteer to lead it, precisely because we need some persons with 
> more knowledge of the ontological Tower of Babel.  We seem to have 
> volunteers in the persons of Messrs. West, Bennett, and Walker.  ;-)
>
> -Ed
>
>
>       (07)


-- 
Mike Bennett
Director
Hypercube Ltd. 
89 Worship Street
London EC2A 2BF
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7917 9522
Mob: +44 (0) 7721 420 730
www.hypercube.co.uk
Registered in England and Wales No. 2461068    (08)


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