Dear John, (01)
See comments below. (02)
Regards (03)
Matthew West
Reference Data Architecture and Standards Manager
Shell International Petroleum Company Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom (04)
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Mobile: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.west@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.shell.com
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/ (05)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontac-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:ontac-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
> Sent: 18 November 2005 18:07
> To: ONTAC-WG General Discussion
> Subject: Re: [ontac-forum] Some thoughts on hub ontology and merging
> sources
>
>
> Rick,
>
> That's a very important point:
>
> RM> I think it's in the context of information flow that
> > will give us the new and different view we need here.
>
> When two people (or programs) interoperate successfully,
> the primary requirement is *not* that they have identical
> world views on every detail. The major constraint is
> that they agree on just that subset of categories that
> are relevant to the information flow between them.
>
> Mathew West made an important point, which I modified
> by changing the word "unfortunately" to "inevitably",
> changing "several" to "untold numbers", and adding
> the phrase "for the purpose at hand":
>
> MW as modified by JS> [Inevitably], even with one universe
> > it is theoretically possible to come up with an infinite
> > number of ontologies - almost certainly none of them truly
> > correct, but possibly [untold numbers] of them being
> > accurate enough to be useful [for the purpose at hand]. (06)
MW: I'm happy to accept the adjustments.
>
> The professor of industrial engineering George Box made
> a related point in a pithy and widely quoted observation:
>
> All models are wrong; some models are useful. (07)
MW: Which is what I was expounding on.
>
> A formal ontology is an axiomatization of a model of some
> domain, which may be as large as the entire universe,
> but more likely is a much smaller model of some domain of
> interacting applications. Furthermore, the information
> that flows among any set of people (or programs) is usually
> much smaller than the union of what all of them know.
>
> Matthew also added the following point:
>
> MW> Merging ontologies will only be possible where the
> > same choices have been made for these (and perhaps other)
> > things. Between ontologies that have made different
> > choices, the ontologies can be expected to differ in
> > their account of the same real world phenomena in a
> > way that cannot be simply merged.
>
> That may be true, but we should ask the next question:
> If we want Program A to interoperate with Program B, why
> should we merge every aspect of the ontology that was used
> by the developers of Program A with every aspect of the
> ontology used by the developers of Program B?
>
> One term I like is "task-oriented interoperability": if
> you try to merge two ontologies, you have to look at the
> *union* of all the categories in both. But if you want
> to enable two programs to interoperate, you only need
> to look at the subsets that are relevant to the task.
>
> Merging two small ontologies is much, much easier. And
> more importantly, if you are only looking at a specific
> task, it is very likely that the subsets appropriate to
> the task will have similar perspectives. (08)
MW: This sounds just fine if all you really have is two
programs with one interface. But when you have hundreds to
thousands of programs and thousands to perhaps millions of
interfaces, you rapidly get an unmaintainable mess at an
engineering level when you consider the change that is
going on. (09)
MW: As a result you see in practice small systems being
merged into larger systems with a (more) common view of the
world. From what I have seen, this follows the need to gain
a better understanding of the world to achieve greater
capability.
>
> Recommendation: Shift attention from the unsolvable problem
> of building, merging, and coordinating global world views to
> the task of developing an open-ended collection of modules
> that can be selected, assembled, and tailored for particular
> tasks or collections of tasks. (010)
MW: I don't doubt that there will always (OK for the foreseeable
future) be very many ontologies (following on from my experience
above, I see new models arising at about the same rate as
existing ones are integrated). However, I think the integration
and merging activity also has its place, and is an equally natural
phenomenon.
>
> John Sowa
>
>
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