The punch line of this exchange is that:
* virtually no applications today use explicit ontologies
* w/o an ontology, there is nothing to map to a UO
* A UO has no use for virtually all applications, from the point of
helping interoperability.
--except-- perhaps to help reverse engineer the implicit ogy of an
application to make it explicit. (01)
So there must be another reason to justify the use of a UO than as the
basis for application interoperability.
At least, in today's world where applications don't have ontologies. (02)
If we are saying that the main purpose of a UO is that it is the only
affordable way to achive semantic interoperability and this is done via
mapping form the application ontologies to the UO, then we are about the
long distant future when applications Do have ontologies. Why are we
doing this now? (03)
Playing devil's advocate, to get our arguments crisp. (04)
Mike (05)
-----Original Message-----
From: Nicola Guarino [mailto:guarino@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, March 06, 2006 6:12 AM
To: Upper Ontology Summit convention
Subject: Re: [uos-convene] The Big Elephant... (06)
On Mar 2, 2006, at 4:26 PM, Uschold, Michael F wrote: (07)
>
> MIkeU said:
>
>> Oh, and by the way, the big elephant in the room is the fact that:
>>
>> It is the rarest of exceptions these days, that an application even
>> HAS an ontology, but hey, for the sake of this summit, shall we all
>> pretend that they do?
>>
>
> Nicola Replied:
>
> Either implicit or explicit, every application has it's own
> "conceptualization" of a domain of interest. Surely, only in few cases (08)
> these conceptualizations are made explicit.
> --
>
> True. The difficulty is if there is no explicit ontology or schema for (09)
> a given application, then there is nothing that can be mapped TO a
> common UO. Hence, what is the value of a UO in this case? (010)
Clearly almost zero, in this case. Maybe an UO can help "reverse
engineering" the implicit conceptualization, though. (011)
Cheers, (012)
Nicola (013)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
Nicola Guarino
Co-Editor in Chief, Applied Ontology (IOS Press) Head, Laboratory for
Applied Ontology (LOA), ISTC-CNR Institute for Cognitive Sciences and
Technologies National Research Council Via Solteri, 38 I-38100 Trento (014)
phone: +39 0461 828486
secretary: +39 0461 436641
fax: +39 0461 435344
email: guarino@xxxxxxxxxx
web site: http://www.loa-cnr.it (015)
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