Re: Any reason for ontology reuse?

Dear Martin,

The ISO does NOT keep any such things for any standards. It just develops standards, guidelines, which can be adopted as mandatory,e.g. for safety, production specs or voluntary like ISO 9000 for quality assurance and control.

The standards I am referring to would be Outlines of Guidelines or the Basic Principles and Elements to be included, or the actual Guidelines themselves which would detail as John Flynn put it some "benchmarking" for vetting procedures.

The idea of a standard is to capture all the possible "best practice" elements in one coherent document.

In the case of ontologies it would build on input from IEEE and similar professional bodies from which the ISO JTC1/SC32 and its WG2 typically draws its committee members.

There are quite a
 few industry sectors and governments in particular which choose to use standards whenever available, if not just for quality control and assurance then for accountability reasons.

Anyone using ISO 9000 or an industry specific standard for quality is encouraged to use standards.

So the standard would just contain the best possible guidelines to capture all best practice elements, gleaned from input of industry bodies or professional bodies, building on the relevant and applicable specs for ontologies.

Who actually builds, maintains and publishes the ontologies is of no concern to the ISO.

Just referring to the Linked Open Data star badges, mentioned by Michael Hausenblas on another email to one of the w3c lists, these could be backed up by a standard which simply lists the vetting procedures and adherence to which specs and elements compliance is met in order to use the corresponding number of stars.

And to make a point some times a "standard" created or endorsed by industry associations, professional bodies or other institutions can be proposed as a standard and with some minor additions published as such by the ISO.

Milton Ponson
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--- On Wed, 12/8/10, Martin Hepp <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:

From: Martin Hepp <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org>
Subject: Re:
 Any reason for ontology reuse?
To: "Semantic Web" <semantic-web@w3.org>
Cc: "Martijn van der Plaat" <martijn@profec.nl>, "Percy Enrique Rivera Salas" <privera.salas@gmail.com>, public-lod@w3.org, "Toby Inkster" <tai@g5n.co.uk>, "ProjectParadigm-ICT-Program" <metadataportals@yahoo.com>
Date: Wednesday, December 8, 2010, 9:35 AM

In general, I think that the Semantic Web must use a decentralized approach for the definition and adoption of conceptual elements, same as the Web uses decentralized, fault-tolerant approaches as a fundamental principle. So calling for standardization bodies to maintain "authoritative" vocabularies will not work at Web Scale, IMO. At least, standards bodies may be to slow to provide ontologies and ontology updates (INCOTERMS, for instance, updates it's definition of trade terms only once per decade)

A few related papers:

1. Possible Ontologies: How
 Reality Constrains the Development of Relevant Ontologies, in: IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 90-96, Jan-Feb 2007
PDF: http://www.heppnetz.de/files/IEEE-IC-PossibleOntologies-published.pdf

2. E-Business Vocabularies as a Moving Target: Quantifying the Conceptual Dynamics in Domains, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW2008), September 29 - October 3, 2008 (forthcoming), Acitrezza, Italy, Springer LNCS, Vol. 5268, pp. 388-403.
PDF: http://www.heppnetz.de/files/ConceptualDynamics-EKAW2008-CRC-final6.pdf

Best
Martin