Perhaps should consider immanent as well as transcendent ontologies

The use cases canvassed are all collections of rules generated by humans
outside the processes the rules are used to regulate. In the terminology of
the OMG Ontology Development Metamodel (ODM) submission, published also as
Hart et al (2004), the rules are all transcendent.

But there is an enormous effort in all sorts of areas to generate rules from
within the processes (immanent) by statistical means, many of which are
covered by techniques in the various subfields of data mining. These rules
are expressed in a variety of forms, but the forms are all
intertranslatable, and all equivalent to rule sets (Colomb 1999).

Some scenarios include:

The US government develops (by a contractor) a set of rules for face
recognition which is mandated for several government agencies and encouraged
for use by agencies of other levels of government and by various industries..

A telephone exchange manufacturer analyses usage patterns and minor fault
reports to arrive at a set of rules that can predict major failures. This
set of rules is used in the network management software by many telcos using
that equipment.

A pathology laboratory develops a set of rules for making clinical
interpretations of a class of blood test. These rules are exported to other
similar laboratories. This community of laboratories has a mechanism to
exchange improvements to the rule set. (Applies to a huge range of medical
diagnostic test artifacts.)
 
Security administrators at a major web site discover a new pattern of
traffic characterizing a new security threat. This pattern is formulated as
a ruleset and communicated widely among site security administrators.
(Applies to a wide variety of situations, including credit card fraud,
identity theft and money laundering.)

Dr. Robert M. Colomb
Reader
Data and Knowledge Engineering Group
School of Information Technology
  and Electrical Engineering          The most thought-provoking thing about
The University of Queensland            our thought-provoking time
QLD 4072 Australia                        is that we are still not thinking..
www.itee.uq.edu.au/~colomb            Heidegger
Phone +61 7 3365 1190
Fax +61 7 3365 4999
 

COLOMB, R.M. (1999) ³Representation of Propositional Expert Systems as
Partial Functions² Artificial Intelligence 109 pp. 187-209.

HART, Lewis, Patrick Emery, Robert Colomb, Kerry Raymond, Dan Chang, Yiming
Ye, Elisa Kendall & Mark Dutra (2004) ³Usage Scenarios and Goals For
Ontology Definition Metamodel² in Zhou, X., Su, S., Papazoglou, M.,
Orlowska, M. and Jeffery, K. (eds.) Web Information Systems Engineering
Conference (WISE¹04) 22-24 November, 2004, Brisbane, Australia. Springer
LNCS 3306 596-607.

Received on Thursday, 6 April 2006 14:48:33 UTC