RE: Antwort: RE: Semantic web article in Nature Biotechnology

Principles are all well and good, but we should know from decades of 
software engineering that saying "do it properly" isn't a solution. We need 
tooling and methdologies that do not in themselves hinder a domain 
specialist. In many cases it is easier to re-develop than re-use or even 
cut-and-paste from an existing ontology than it is to muck around "doing it 
properly".

Of course, I'd love a world of ontologies done properly, but realistically, 
life is often too short. As a comunity we need to enable rather than preach.

Robert.
At 03:38 30/09/2005, wangxiao wrote:

>To Helen Chen,
>
> > In Healthcare domain, different regulatory bodies may develop
> > ontologies for their practice guidelines, and disease
> > management centers develop their own care plans and
> > protocols.   It is not realistic to hope for a
> > well-coordinated ontology that covers everything nicely under
> > the hood.
>
>Of course, it is not the job of SW to well-coordinated ontology creation.
>But we need to have a common vision how ontology is going to evolve over
>time.  For instance, when I design a 2D gel ontology.  When I want to
>specify that "spot shape Ellipse".  I would put Ellipse in a separate
>namespace because the existence of Ellipse has no effects on the
>conceptualization of "spot".  By this, if there is a well defined geometry
>ontology along with a software library.  I can easiy switch to it without
>breaking my gel ontology.  Such kind of engineering principle will help us
>to build resuable ontology.  The charter shall make such recommendations to
>principles like that.
>
> > What I understand of the power of semantic web technology
> > lays the connecting and inference capability between those
> > "fragmented" knowledge bases.  This connection is to be
> > reached by a thin layer of "over-arching" ontology and a set
> > of basic rules. We have limited experience in linking
> > (mapping) our rather "monolithically developed" RPGOntology
> > (ontology for EU-radiation protection guideline) with SNOMED
> > CT(http://www.snomed.org/snomedct/).  The benefit of such
> > connection can not be over-stated.
>
>It will help if the "fragmented" means "orthogonal".  If two ontologies
>overlap, you need to merge or align them, which IMHO is not an easier task!
>Again, if everytime I want to use ontologies build by others, I need to
>manually tweak it a little bit.  We lost the spirit of SW a little bit.  I
>am not saying that we can avoid the problem but good engineer principle can
>minimize it.

Received on Monday, 3 October 2005 15:13:47 UTC