SUO: Varieties Of Ontology Project
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VOOP. Note 1
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Problem Statement.
A. What are the different types of ontology projects
that are covered by our current scope and purpose?
B. What are the criteria that are appropriate
to each of the different ontology projects?
Given, then, that different types of ontology projects
will have different criteria for the acceptability and
the adequacy of proposals at each stage of development,
let us see if we can formulate the respective criteria
for a number of ontology projects that fall within the
charge, scope and purpose of a standard upper ontology.
A variety of ontology projects come to mind.
I will give them these working designations:
1. ROSO
What are the minimal criteria of acceptability of
a "research oriented scientific ontology" (ROSO)?
2. ULTO
What are the minimal criteria of acceptability for
an "upper level technical ontology" (ULTO)?
3. URFO
What are the minimal criteria of acceptability for
an "un-reflective folk ontology" (URFO)?
We've all concurred, or at least relented, that there's
room enough under the Standard Umbrella Ontology for the
type of "un-reflective folk ontology" (URFO) that concerns
itself mostly with "shoes, ships, sealing wax", and so on,
but the question remains, on less rainy days, whether the
principles and the parameters that suit the garden variety
URFO are adaptable to the rigors of the ROSO and the ULTO.
After we have settled on the minimal criteria of acceptability,
we might then venture into establishing the ideal criteria of
adequacy for the respective types of ontologies.
Defining, or at least characterizing these types
of ontology projects would of course be a major
part of the task of developing the respective
criteria for acceptability and adequacy.
Jon Awbrey
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Notes from previous exchanges:
JA = Jon Awbrey
JH = Jay Halcomb
PG = Pierre Grenon
PG: Never the less, it seems to me that this group would be
better off if proposed material was judged on criteria
similar to those by which the final product shall be
evaluated, rather than dependent upon pleasant
email exchanges.
JH: I agree with this view, which was the essential point
of my last e-mail -- getting more specific about such
criteria for working documents.
JA: Many people, present writer included, have observed that the criteria
appropriate to different kinds of ontology applications and projects,
all of them nonetheless falling under the rather large tent of our
scope and purpose document, may be radically different.
JA: In particular, I have pointed to the differences in working methodology
and goals of research oriented ontologies and, for the lack of a better
name, so-called commonsense ontologies.
JH: Precisely so. I think that we've many of us said these similar
things at one time or another, and we always return to them when
a proposal is made (recall the discussion about the CycL language
when that proposal was made). That is why I think that developing
clearer acceptance criteria, upfront, for specifying these various
targets is important, when it comes to working documents for the
group. Specifically, developing specification criteria for
terminologies, languages, and logic(s). I would hope the
IFF folks should have some specific thoughts about this.
JA: Until a better term comes along, I'm using the word "project"
somewhat in the way that people speak of cultural projects or
existential projects -- broad, compelling, if slightly vague
intimations of something that needs to be done.
JA: Here is a narrative about one sort of ontology project,
the aims, criteria, and working assumptions of which
I am acquainted with, and feel like I understand:
JA: I once got sold on the project of building software bridges between
qualitative and quantitative research. For example, in many areas
of clinical practice, medical anthropology, and public health one
has "practitioner-scientist models" where people accumulate lots
of free-floating informal hunches and qualitative impressions in
their on-the-job settings, that they then need to follow up with
hard data gathering, quantitatively measurable constructs, and
the usual battery of statistical methods. A lot of practical
savvy never gets widely distributed, and a lot of benighted
mythology never gets tested, all for the lack of good ways
to refine this "personal knowledge" into scientific truth.
JA: It still seems to me that properly designed lexical and logical resources
ought to provide us with some of the plancks we need to build this bridge.
JA: At first strike, it sounds like this ought to involve an integration of
research oriented and common sense ontologies. But there has seemed to
arise one insurmountable obstacle after another in trying to do this.
JA: Just by way of focusing on a concrete illustration, take the word "event".
Formalizing the concept of "event" for a research oriented ontology does
not require any discusssion on our part. Those discussions were carried
out somewhere between the days of powdered-wig-wearing-high-rollers and
the days of manurial comparisons. To get the standard axioms, one goes
to a standard reference book and copies them into one's knowledge base:
| PAS. Probability And Statistics -- Ontology List
|
| 01. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg04885.html
| 02. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg04886.html
| 03. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg04887.html
| 04. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg04888.html
|
| et sic deinceps ...
JA: The only question is whether one's favorite ontology prover is up to
the snuff of proving whatever theorems need to be proved thereon.
JA: There can be no compromise with these criteria.
The research market simply will not bear it.
So if there is to be an integration with
nontechnical language and methodology,
it must be an augmentation of these
basics and not their overwriting.
JA: I have gotten used to the idea that there is another sort of ontology project,
but since I do not get the cogency of it, it seems like its definition and its
criteria of validity would have to come from the critical self-examination of
those whose project it is. All I know at present is that the obvious course
that I suggested above for formalizing the concept "event" is probably the
course of last resort from the standpoint of this alternative project.
JA: That is what I mean by radical differences in working criteria for acceptance.
JA: Similar disjunctions of approach and acceptability could be observed
for several other dimensions of diversity among ontological projects,
for example, the "already been chewed" vs. the "knowledge soup" brands,
that is, those who expect full-fledged axiom systems from the outset
vs. those who would gel their knowledge chunks out of a semiotic sol.
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