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

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 Friday, 30 September 2005 02:38:28 UTC