Re[2]: Place of UFO in ontology development

 Henry,
 Suppose a "good UFO" must be connected with viability and
 self-organization of systems. Therefore suppose the VSM
 (http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it/beer_vsm.html) and Autopoietic systems
 theory must be taken into account for a UFO.

 Best,
 Leonid Ototsky- http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it

> I would agree that it would be nice to have good UFOs. They would  
> help us think about modeling problems and make our graphs more easily
> mergeable. But the point we are making  is that it is not because  
> UFOs are impossible, difficult or not ready, or because there is not
> going to be a single UFO, that nothing can be done on the SemWeb.

> Henry

> On 5 Apr 2006, at 21:02, David Price wrote:

>> The Semantic Web seems to me to be between a rock and a hard place.
>> The rock seems to be the view that UFOs are problematic. The hard  
>> place seems to be the idea that people around the globe are going  
>> to develop ontologies in isolation, then import ontologies  
>> developed by others into their application and magically usefully  
>> reuse them. While that approach might work for a few simple cases  
>> like FOAF, to my mind it presents a serious problem for the  
>> Semantic Web for anything even slightly more complex.
>>
>> Given the hard place, it's unclear to me why anyone would insist on
>> throwing the UFO baby out with the bath water. NIST hosted a  
>> workshop a couple of weeks ago on UFOs so everyone has not yet  
>> given up (see http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl? 
>> UpperOntologySummit ). Practically speaking, some level of UFO that
>> forces a rigourous analysis of the concepts in an ontology seems  
>> quite useful to me. That there are incompatible UFOs is no reason  
>> to throw them out. Almost all ontologies developed independently  
>> are incompatible so how can the import and reuse approach work  
>> either? In my 20 odd years experience with IT practitioners I've  
>> found wildly varying degrees of model quality, believe everyone  
>> would benefit from a good analysis approach and think a UFO can  
>> play that role. The question seems to me to be just how "U" the  
>> UFOs need to be and in what situations they solve a real-world  
>> problem. The UFO approach does not have to be perfect, just produce
>> better results than the alternative.
>>
>> I've worked for more than 15 years in ISO/OMG on standards for  
>> engineering modeling and so do have a bias in that direction. I'm  
>> also part of a project trying to make practical use of ISO 15926-2
>> which was presented at the NIST summit. After seeing hundreds of  
>> models/databases designed to support engineering applications I  
>> also doubt that a statistical/structural analysis can determine the
>> intended semantics behind them but will try and keep an open mind.
>> It seems to me that useful ontologies are far more likely to be  
>> engineered into existence so I'll end my comments and go back to  
>> trying to do just that.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> David
> [snip]




-- 
С уважением,
 Leonid                          mailto:leo@mgn.ru

Received on Wednesday, 5 April 2006 19:50:26 UTC