Dear Pat: (01)
John F. Sowa wrote:
> PH> There is no evidence for, and considerable pragmatic evidence
> > against, the thesis that ontology engineering is improved by
> > approaching it with the tools of philosophy, and certainly not
> > with the methodologies of contemporary professional philosophy.
>
>
I think that is too bold a statement, and I would like to see the
"pragmatic evidence against the thesis that
ontology engineering is improved by approaching it with the tools of
philosophy". (02)
First: I hope you agree that ontologies are most effective when they
define such categories (e.g. classes or relationship types)
for which the category membership of a given phenomenon (03)
1. is consensual among a large amount of individuals,
2. is valid across multiple contexts, and
3. remains valid over time. (04)
(Also, we must find a good trade-off between granularity and ease of
population - too subtle distinctions put a brake on populating
respective knowledge bases, too coarse distinctions limit the degree of
automation for processing the information - but that point is not needed
for my argument.) (05)
This challenge is independent of the expressiveness of the formalism and
of the amount of axioms that we use for constraining the intension of a
conceptual element in the ontology.
If the categories defined are weak in one of the three respects, even
richly axiomatized ontologies are of limited value. (06)
For example, ontologies that distinguish
- between book copies vs. book titles,
- between product models and products, or
- between human beings and their roles (like "student") (07)
are more useful than those that lack those distinctions because the
former don't mess up apples and oranges for tasks that need to keep them
apart. (08)
Now, from my experience in designing real-world ontologies and teaching
conceptual modeling to students, the latter now for almost a decade now,
finding such "good" categories and evaluating their fitness is, *the*
key challenge in ontology engineering.
Everything else builds on top of that. (09)
I have no formal education in philosophy, unfortunately, but Welty's and
Guarino's "OntoClean" work, and other contributions that employ subtle
distinctions of categories of existence that are mainly rooted in
philosophy, are the only significant guidance for that challenge I am
aware of. I can exactly confirm what Alan Rector reported on OntoClean
in 2002 - that it simplifies the argument for better ontological choices. (010)
In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor in his work on "Scientific Management"
has given quite some evidence that finding the ideal conceptualization
of a problem or task benefits from scientific methods in the course of
the analysis, more than from pure motivation or practical experience in
the domain. (011)
I am deeply convinced that we should transfer his spirit to the case of
ontology engineering: that we need methodological guidance on how to
define the most efficient categories. Towards that end, 2000 years of
experience in developing subtle distinctions among categories of
existence may be the only guidance that we have. I would not dispose
that asset lightheartedly. (012)
Of course one can overdo it in the strive for a single, "objective"
category system - such is obviously practically impossible to engineer
under resource constraints and in a world with non-zero degree of
dynamics and subjective judgment. (013)
Best wishes (014)
Martin (015)
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen (016)
e-mail: mhepp@xxxxxxxxxxxx
phone: +49-(0)89-6004-4217
fax: +49-(0)89-6004-4620
www: http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
skype: mfhepp
twitter: mfhepp (017)
Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
================================================================= (018)
Webcast:
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/ (019)
Recipe for Yahoo SearchMonkey:
http://tr.im/rAbN (020)
Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009:
"Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp (021)
Talk at (022)
Overview article on Semantic Universe:
http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe (023)
Project page:
http://purl.org/goodrelations/ (024)
Resources for developers:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations (025)
Tutorial materials:
CEC'09 2009 Tutorial: The Web of Data for E-Commerce: A Hands-on Introduction
to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey
http://tr.im/grcec09 (026)
martin_hepp.vcf
Description: Vcard
_________________________________________________________________
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 (01)
|