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)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/uom-ontology-std/
Subscribe: mailto:uom-ontology-std-join@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Config/Unsubscribe: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/uom-ontology-std/
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/UoM/
Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UoM_Ontology_Standard (09)
|