Dear Leo, (01)
I have to pick up on this. (02)
> This is true. The job of a data model (as conventionally
> applied) is
> to provide persistence support to applications. Of course there has
> been a tremendous amount of work, dating back to the 70's (I'm
> thinking of Bill Kent's "Data and Reality") that argue that data
> models, too, need to pay attention to the "real world". Is the only
> thing new with "ontologies" that they bring some extra
> logical muscle
> to achieving this attention-paying on a larger scale?
>
> LEO: De facto, all data models are local. (03)
MW: Why? (04)
> There may be those who have
> promoted wider visions of those models, but I expect 99% of database
> folks (theorists and practitioners) will say: only obliquely are we
> concerned with the "real world". (05)
MW: I've been developing data models for 20+ years now and even in the
early days the numbers were much better than that where I come from.
Nowadays it is hard to find someone developing data models (let me be
explicit here, logical or conceptual data models and not so much database
schemas) who does not see themselves as being about concerned about
the "real world". Apparently we don't inhabit the same "real world". (06)
MW: Another key point is the need for an ontology to be expressed in
a logic. Clearly this is necessary if your purpose involves inferencing
over the ontology, but frankly this is a minority sport. There is vastly
more ontology embedded in database schemas, their contents, and the
procedural code that operates on them than in ontologies expressed in
terms of first order logic. (07)
MW: Now much of this is "crappy" ontology, but so is much of what is
expressed in FOL. The result, however, is that the benefits to be gained
in applying better ontolgy in business applications in the relatively
short term is much greater than in the relatively green fields of
inferencing, and this is not dependent on being expressed in a logical
form. (08)
Regards (09)
Matthew West
Reference Data Architecture and Standards Manager
Shell International Petroleum Company Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom (010)
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Mobile: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.west@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.shell.com
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/ (011)
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