RE: Cross-ontologies reasoning

I'm not sure that you would use ontology mapping for factory floor control (at least not in the near future). Would you trust someone else to send an ontology in to your factory to control anything?

I think a much more likely scenario is consumer applications. For example, you have a restaurant reservation system controlled by an ontology. The things the ontology is knows about are times, food styles (french, italian), locations, (manhattan, greenwich village), etc. Initially, your system handles reservations submitted using your ontology, over web services. Later on, you for some reason arrange to handle reservations from some other system (acquisition, etc.) The newly acquired reservation system also runs on an ontology, which is similar, in the same domain, but uses different classnames, resources, etc. 

I do not think it would be overly difficult to construct a system that could get a message in the new ontology, map it to the original, make a reservation, map the result back to the original ontology and return it. Initially, it probably takes some human intervention. However, after a few more acquisitions (and enhancements), the system could well be expected to do a pretty good job of taking a message based on yet another ontology and performing the above transformation with minimal or no intervention.

chas

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Andersen [mailto:andersen@ontologyworks.com]
> Sent: Monday, December 29, 2003 7:00 AM
> To: Jim Hendler
> Cc: public-sws-ig@w3.org; www-rdf-logic@w3.org; Drew McDermott
> Subject: Re: Cross-ontologies reasoning
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Dec 26, 2003, at 1205, Jim Hendler wrote:
> >
> > Drew,. I agree completely if we use your definition of 
> > ontology-merging.  Partial mappings have a greater
> > success (particularly allowing heuristic mechanisms), and of course 
> > there's no reason we can't have some human in the loop.  
> Also, none of 
> > the literature I know allows instances to be mapped against 
> multiple 
> > ontologies, which is a new idea that occurs easily on the Semantic 
> > Web, and which opens many opportunities for new research.
> >  So I guess I'm kidding myself
> >  -JH
> 
> Hey, Jim...
> 
> I don't often post to this group but this discussion is near to my 
> heart - well,
> at least to my research interests.  I think the answer depends not so 
> much on the
> ontologies, but on the systems that advertise those ontologies as a 
> description
> of what they "know about".  Your prescription would be fine 
> if all you 
> want to
> do is content management.  There, close is good enough.  Close is not 
> good enough
> for many database integration applications, where much could hinge on 
> the
> correctness of the mapping (e.g., a factory floor control 
> application). 
>   Drew
> is likely to be correct that such mappings will be hard to come by 
> automatically,
> but, just like what kind of "ontology" you need depends on what you 
> want to do
> with it, so it is with what kind of mappings you need.  
> Bottom line is 
> I don't
> think you're kidding yourself so long as you stick to (vary) 
> fault-tolerant
> applications.
> 
> Question: What does it mean "[to map] instances against multiple 
> ontologies"?
> 
>    .bill
> 
> --
> Bill Andersen (andersen@ontologyworks.com)
> Chief Scientist
> Ontology Works, Inc. (www.ontologyworks.com)
> 1132 Annapolis Road, Suite 104
> Odenton, Maryland 21113
> United States
> Office: 410-674-7600
> Mobile: 443-858-6444
> 
>

Received on Monday, 5 January 2004 14:09:55 UTC