SUO: RE: (ELP's summary of MRW's standards experience) Was: A NEW FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT FORMAL MOTION...
Thanks for your reply.
Please see below:
<snip>
> > 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.
[ELP] Perhaps we should agree to differ on their being any hope of that
in this group.
> >
> > 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.
[ELP] This group does not yet agree on whether we are merging ontologies
into a single standard ontology. But my first motion has been seconded
by John S., so maybe we can vote and stop glorifying the notion of what
I will call a hydra standard. Hopefully the hydra that is just helping
us to merge is innocuous or maybe helpful.
I wonder how many of us actually read the extensive web site on what the
repository for which you all voted?
> > ______________________________________________________________
> > __________
> > ___
> >
> > 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.
[ELP] I've long observed that, in terms of practical usage in the
industry, the two are equivalent. So I'm sorry for mischaracterizing
your work. But I claim that perhaps the most fundamental and important
part of an OO or ontological design is its relational subset. In fact,
the inheritance relation is typically demoted to just another relation
in non-frame-based ontological systems. So be proud of the relational
part of your work. Stand up and be counted ;^)
And since I have a hard time envisioning most of your users using a
non-relational model, I rather assume that one of the "multiple
versions" of your standard of which you have spoken, is a relational
model extracted from your OO model. That sounds like more or less what
I've been trying to get my customer thinking about.
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.
The acoustic returns that I'm getting indicate the bedrock is a couple
of miles down below marine clay. That's why I'm suggesting starting
with an existing ontology.
> We all know what happened to the house built
> on sand.
[ELP] You want far more that the simple initial foundation that I want.
You want to load it up with axiom. You want n^2 mappings between
existing ontologies. You don't like the existing candidates, so you
seem to want to jump out into untested waters. You are truly brave.
28 For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first,
and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?
29 Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to
finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him,
30 Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish.
Isn't this group composed chiefly of folk spending discretionary work
time and/or personal time?
This group has nothing resembling a work breakdown/plan that I could
analyze and potentially agree with. I think we share this concern.
But my SWAGS come up orders of magnitude short of us having the
resources to do what you want to do in a reasonable time. But since you
have the hope and the long term view, I nominate you to come up with
such a work break down. No matter how far off it turns out to be, it
should prove to be a much needed straw-person to start that dialogue and
pushing us toward deciding what our charter means in practical terms and
whether we believe in it.
> >
> > 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.
[ELP] It sounds like your rules had the full power of Horn logic.
> >
> > 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.
[ELP] Do they bottle this optimism somewhere? I'd love a shot of it;^)
Actually, I admire much of your patience and long-term view. And I
shared a differently organized brand of it. I just think that there
needs to be some line of demarcation out there between standards work
and development. If we are going to call it all standards work, can we
agree to invent two new words that map to what I call standards work and
what I call development?
Where do you draw the line between standards work and development.
>
> 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 ...
[ELP] Sorry, I assumed you were talking about instances/tuples so I
didn't count them as being part of the data model.
> >
> > 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.
[ELP] Right. Can you be more concrete about what you don't like about
Opencyc and SUMO - in the context of them being 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.
[ELP] I was hoping you would quantify what was already done, but if you
completely threw out any trace of the previous work (including the
experienced gained) - never mind.
>
> > (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.
[ELP] Do tell.
>
> > (iii) the
> > designers are funded,
>
> MW: Correct. The funding level is not enormous though.
[ELP] So you three weren't close to full time?
>
> > (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.
[ELP] You've got me curious. What are your customers doing with your
standardized rules?
>
> > (v) the design work is not
> > technologically complex,
>
> MW: Don't know where you get this from.
[ELP] Sounds like quite a system.
>
> > (vi) and that the domain is not too large in
> > entity/relation count.
>
> MW: 50,000 concepts and growing is small eh?
[ELP] So these are domain subclasses that you are keeping separate from
an upper ontology? Can you give me a URL to a particular specimen?
>
> > 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.
[ELP] I would avoid using the "ER" term without qualifying it as to the
beyond-relational features you use. Otherwise, boatloads of us will
assume the typical relational usage.
>
> > 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.
[ELP] Amen.
<snip>
[ELP]
Best,
-Eric