Re: Ontology Wars? Concerned

There are lots of trade-offs when designing an ontology, e.g. 
specificity vs. size of the target user community - this has e.g. been 
discussed in

Hepp, Martin: Possible Ontologies: How Reality Constrains the 
Development of Relevant Ontologies, in: IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 
11, No. 1, pp. 90-96, Jan-Feb 2007.

A PDF is at

http://www.heppnetz.de/files/IEEE-IC-PossibleOntologies-published.pdf

Martin


Paul Houle wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 2:23 PM, Nathan <nathan@webr3.org> wrote:
>
>   
>> I'm finding the path to entry in to the linked open data world rather
>> difficult and confusing, and only for one specific reason - ontologies;
>> it /feels/ like there are some kind of ontology wars going on and I can
>> never get a definitive clear answer.
>>
>>
>>     
> An ontology war is preferable to the alternative:  the "one ring" that rules
> them all.
>
> If you're trying to develop an ontology for topic X,  it's usually easy to
> make one that's good but obviously not perfect:  let's say, 95% correct.
>
> You need to cross an "uncanny valley" in the attempt to go from 95% to 100%,
>  and often things get worse rather than better.  This is one of the reasons
> why Cyc is perceived as a failure:  although it was trying to model the
> "common sense" knowledge that we all share,  the actual structures in Cyc
> that try to represent everything in a consistent way are bizzare,
>  counterintuitive and certainly not representative of how people think,  no
> matter how correct they may be.
>
> People don't have a completely consistent taxonomy of the world either;
>  they have models of different parts of reality that they'll mesh when they
> need to mesh them.  My 94% correct version of topic X might be great for
> what I'm doing w/ topic X and your 96% version is great for what you're
> doing.  Trying to build one system that's perfect might result in something
> that's not as good for what we're doing...  But in the long term we do need
> tools that let us mesh these easily.
>
> SPARQL + OWL can take us part of the way in that direction,  but really,  we
> need something better in that direction,  largely because of the many
> "almost the same as" relationships that are out there...
>
>   

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

e-mail:  hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
phone:   +49-(0)89-6004-4217
fax:     +49-(0)89-6004-4620
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         http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
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twitter: mfhepp

Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
=================================================================

Project page:
http://purl.org/goodrelations/

Resources for developers:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations

Webcasts:
Overview - http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/
How-to   - http://vimeo.com/7583816

Recipe for Yahoo SearchMonkey:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_and_Yahoo_SearchMonkey

Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009: 
"Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
http://www.slideshare.net/mhepp/semantic-webbased-ecommerce-the-goodrelations-ontology-1535287

Overview article on Semantic Universe:
http://www.semanticuniverse.com/articles-semantic-web-based-e-commerce-webmasters-get-ready.html

Tutorial materials:
ISWC 2009 Tutorial: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in Brief: A Hands-on Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey 
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/Web_of_Data_for_E-Commerce_Tutorial_ISWC2009