SUO: RE: (ELP's summary of MRW's standards experience) Was: A NEW FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT FORMAL MOTION...
Dear Eric,
See comments below.
Matthew West
Principal Consultant
Shell Information Technology International Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Other Tel: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.west@shell.com
Internet: http://www.shell.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Peterson [mailto:epeterson@CCAAVA.com]
> Sent: 17 June 2003 17:50
> To: West, Matthew R SITI-ITPSIE; John F. Sowa; Mike Pool;
> apease@ks.teknowledge.com; clegg@cyc.com; John DeOliveira
> Cc: Patrick Cassidy; standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> Subject: (ELP's summary of MRW's standards experience) Was: A NEW
> FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT FORMAL MOTION...
>
>
> Hi Matthew;
>
> Thanks for your patience in answering my questions.
>
>
> We initially weighed in at the complete opposite ends of the
> spectrum as
> to whether a standards group is an appropriate place to do the bulk of
> the engineering/design behind its standard.
>
> I claimed there should be a de facto standard to standardize and that
> the market place was the appropriate place to design and prove a de
> facto standard.
>
> You claimed the expertise of a standards group would
> naturally foster a
> standard even in the absence of anything akin to a de facto
> standard in
> the marketplace. You further claimed that it was the best
> possible way
> to do it (given the alternatives).
MW: Yes, the key thing is having a place where ideas have the rough
edges worn off them, and good ideas get taken up more widely.
>
> For both of our respective supporting arguments, this email
> thread will
> have to be searched.
>
> Please chime in if you feel misquoted. I made some assumptions to try
> to shorten the process of asking you so many questions.
>
> Would I be fair in characterizing and contrasting your effort as
> follows?
> ______________________________________________________________
> __________
> __
> Although your standards group was large, only a hand full of
> its members
> claimed to have design experience. The other members were domain
> experts.
MW: No, I was quoting the background and foreground participants
with "design" (my word would be analysis) experience. There was/is a much
larger diaspora of domain experts, say hundreds. We ended up working
in increasing circles by a combination of peer review and agreement.
>
> I think most of us in the SUO would claim ontology design experience.
MW: Yes. Some 10 years ago in EPISTLE we had face to face meetings of
30-40 people that felt very like what is happening here. It took a
while to build trust and for the first 6 and then 3 to emerge who were
trusted to lead the work technically.
>
> I, therefore, see much more potential for design disagreement
> in a group
> like the SUO. And since we haven't shown a great amount of unity, we
> can't yet claim that having more designers is better.
MW: Not as long as everyone wants to be in charge. One of the reasons I
support John Sowa's proposal is that I think it will support the development
of convergence, but allow a large number of people to stay on board whilst
the consensus emerges.
> ______________________________________________________________
> __________
> ___
>
> Complexity-wise, I see your small design group as having conducted an
> admirably large design effort. But technology-wise it was a well
> understood technical exercise (relational DB design with a bit of OO
> mixed in).
MW: There was no relational DB design, we developed an entity relationship
model. This is roughly equivalent to a DL based ontology. However, the
tough bit was recognising the need for, finding and agreeing to a paradigm
(four dimensionalism in our case) that meant that we could develop the
model in a regular and consistent way so that where there was disagreement
we had more than opinion to fall back on. The problem I see here is an
unwillingness to do the hard work of getting down to the bedrock so we
can build solid foundations. We all know what happened to the house built
on sand.
>
> SUO is attempting to design something that has:
> - Inference rules
> - Free-form FOL axioms
> - A design intended to properly anticipate all lower level designs
> depending on it.
> - Little in the way of canonical technical approaches in these areas.
MW: We were only missing the free form FOL axioms.
>
> I hope we agree that SUO is doing something much more complex and much
> less proven.
MW: No, I just see it as taking the next incremental step from where we
were. As far as a 4D ontology is concerned we have a decent foundation
and framework. All it needs is some additional work to add a next layer
of axioms. Once we get past working out the best representation, we need
do little more than examine the axioms floating around in this arena
and reverse engineer them into a 4D ontology. Not trivial, but not
outrageous either.
Now for those wishing to develop a 3D ontology, you are mostly
back where we were 10 years ago with no clear foundation to build on.
I see some hope in the work Nicola is doing with DOLCE, and some similar
efforts to start building an ontology on a principled basis. But until
those ideas take hold, you are doomed to go round in circles.
> ______________________________________________________________
> __________
> ___
> Size-wise you list ~200 entity/relations.
MW: Plus some 50,000 concepts as reference data ...
>
> SUO could easily end up with 3000. That's not even counting
> non-structural (non-DL) axioms.
MW: Which is why it is so important to get solid foundations.
> ______________________________________________________________
> __________
> ___
> ______________________________________________________________
> __________
> ___
>
> I must admit to inaccurately extrapolating from my own standards
> experience. When John Sowa agreed with my "no standard without a de
> facto standard" mantra and cited a lot of personal standards
> experience,
> I thought I was making a safe assumption in believing it to be an
> uncontroversial SUO view
> (http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/suo/email/msg09209.html). But that no
> longer appears to me to be so.
>
> But, having said that, the moral I take from your standards effort is
> that a standards group has a chance at crafting an acceptable standard
> if (i) Much/most of the design work is already done
MW: Don't see where you get this from. We had a couple of start points
not unlike OpenCyc and SUMO. One was clearly better, so we started from
there. It was principalled, (better than SUMO and OpenCyc) but not well
enough. along the way we threw out everything we started with - mostly
when we finally adopted 4D.
> (ii) the designers
> are unified via technological belief or by hierarchy,
MW: We certainly had technical differences. But we developed an approach to
resolve them.
> (iii) the
> designers are funded,
MW: Correct. The funding level is not enormous though.
> (iv) the remaining design work is not
> technologically controversial,
MW: Well no-one has done anything like we have done in EPISTLE, and
so nearly everything we have done has been considered controversial.
As one example, no-one before has combined data model with reference
data.
> (v) the design work is not
> technologically complex,
MW: Don't know where you get this from.
> (vi) and that the domain is not too large in
> entity/relation count.
MW: 50,000 concepts and growing is small eh?
> But this is not to claim that your
> model was not
> a complex model within the relative simplicity of the
> relational model.
MW: Entity Relationship is NOT relational.
> Your model sounds rather impressive.
>
> Moving forward, I don't think we are going to agree on the
> general need
> for a prior de fact standard. But I'm hoping that we can agree trying
> to simplify the SUO process.
MW: We need to find a METHODOLOGY that allows us to move forward in
something approaching a straight line - if slowly.
>
> Please see below for a couple of interspersed questions.
>
>
> Cheers!
>
> -Eric
>
>
> <snip>
>
> > > [ELP] About how many tables/entities/classes and attributes
> > > did you end
> > > up with?
> >
> > MW: There are 201 entity types. The model is highly
> normalised, around
> > 5th normal form, so there aren't many attributes, they mostly turn
> into
> > relationships. There are about 20-30 in the whole model.
>
> [ELP] What percentage of this model was designed outside the standards
> process.?
>
> Were the two other designers peers of yours? Were you (or one of the
> others) usually treated as a de facto leader?
MW: We were peers, but with different skill sets/roles. I was perhaps
the creative force, but one of my colleagues was very strong at making
sure we covered the detailed and awkward cases. We worked as a team.
>
> <snip>
>
> > > [ELP] Here are some more questions:
> > > * Was your group using a relatively long used, well
> understood data
> > > modeling approach such as OO or relational via ER diagrams or
> > > some such?
> >
> > MW: We used EXPRESS which is standardised entity relationship
> modelling
> > language with both a graphical and lexical form. It is similar in
> power
> > to the static modelling part of UML.
> >
> > > * Were there were seasoned tools available for the design work and
> for
> > > the utilization of your standard model.
> >
> > MW: Being an ISO standard, EXPRESS has a number of high
> quality tools
> > for model development. Implementation environments for the
> data model
> > have also been developed in parallel with the standard and are
> available
> > from commercial vendors.
> >
> > > * Was there an established community of "real" users that stood to
> > > immediately benefit from sharing data.
> >
> > MW: Yes. The focus for the standard was the hand over of engineering
> > desig information for process plant between engineering
> contractor and
> > plant operator. However, the models have MUCH wider
> applicability than
> > this.
> >
> > > * Did that community or one of its components explicitly fund your
> > > standards work.
> >
> > MW: Yes. My involvement was/is funded explicitly by Shell. There are
> > several consortia who together have funded other parts of the
> development.
> > It wasn't always like that. It started off as a hobby activity.
> >
> > > * Were there a number of models already produced and used by your
> > > stakeholders that were already used somewhat for sharing?
> >
> > MW: No. We take take some work we had done in Shell as a start point
> > though.
> >
> > > * Did your stakeholders have something akin to concrete
> > > success criteria
> > > - such as being able to decide whether they could share and
> > > receive the
> > > type of data contained in their own internal schemas.
> >
> > MW: You are assuming they had internal schema's documented for their
> > data ... We have very much been leading the way in trying to show
> > people what is possible, and how things could be better.
> Resistance to
> > change has been a major barrier.
> > >
> > >
> > > Thanks again,
> > >
> > > -Eric
> > >
> > >
> > > <snip>
> > >
> > >
>