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Ontolog: Post OntologySummit2010_Symposium Meeting - Sharing and Integrating Ontologies - Tue 2010.03.16

  • Convener: Dr. JohnSowa (Vivomind Intelligence)
  • Title: "Sharing and Integrating Ontologies"
  • Outcome: The "Shared and Integrated Ontologies (SIO)" project is born!

On-site Venue: "Employee Lounge" - NIST Building 101 (Main Building) ... (same venue as the OntologySummit2010_Symposium)

Conference Call Details

  • Date: Tuesday, March 16, 2010
  • Start Time: 12:45pm PDT / 3:45pm EDT / 8:45pm CET / 19:45 UTC
  • Expected Call Duration: ~1.5 hours
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  • Please note that this session will be recorded, and the audio archive is expected to be made available as open content to our community membership and the public at-large under our prevailing open IPR policy.

Attendees

  • Expecting: on-site
  • Expecting: remote
    • AlexGarcia (remote)
    • (please add yourself to the list if you are a member of this community, or, rsvp to <peter.yim@cim3.com>)

Agenda & Proceedings

  • Session Format and Agenda:
    • this will be virtual session over a phone conference setting, augmented by shared computer screen support
    1. The session will start with a brief (10 sec.) self-introduction of the attendees [We will be skipping this if there are more than 20 participants.]
    2. Presentation by John F. Sowa (~45 min.)
    3. Q&A and Open discussion (~30 min.) [Kindly identify yourself before speaking.]

Topic: "Sharing and Integrating Ontologies"

  • Abstract: by JohnSowa
Two or more application programs that interoperate successfully on common data must be based, explicitly or implicitly, on some agreement about the meaning of that data. Internally, those applications may use very different syntax, and some of their processing may depend on information that is not described in the common agreements. For example, a personnel database and a medical database may share information about the names, addresses, and Social Security numbers of many of the same people. But the business-related details in the personnel DB and the case histories in the medical DB would not be shared. In general, interoperability requires precise documentation of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of all the interactions among interoperable systems. Formal ontologies are metadata about the things, events, properties, people, and information involved in the design, implementation, and use of those systems.
This report evolved from an email discussion in Ontolog Forum starting in February, 2010. Since many of the ideas were introduced, elaborated, and modified by multiple participants, it's impossible to credit any particular individual for any specific point. Instead, all participants in the thread with the subject line Foundation Ontology, Cyc, and Mapping should be acknowledged as contributors. Some related discussions, also starting in February, took place on the email list of the Architecture Ecosystem SIG of the Object Management Group, which also influenced the ideas presented in this report. Other publications and presentations are cited in the body of the report and collected in the bibliography at the end.

Transcript of the online chat during the session

see raw transcript here.

(for better clarity, the version below is a re-organized and lightly edited chat-transcript.)

Participants are welcome to make light edits to their own contributions as they see fit.

Peter P. Yim: .

Welcome to the Ontolog Post Summit Symposium Meeting

- Sharing and Integrating Ontologies - Tue 2010.03.16

  • Title: "Sharing and Integrating Ontologies"

Please refer to details on the session page

at: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2010_03_16

.

anonymous morphed into Matt Hettinger

anonymous morphed into Doug Foxvog

Mike Bennett: Could some ask that questione be repeated please, I can't hear them at all

Simon Spero: Gavagai?

Simon Spero: Undetached ontology parts

Peter P. Yim: my apologies about the mess with the chat-room links

Mike Bennett: I was beginning to wonder if I was in the wrong room - thanks Peter!

Mike Bennett: Re the last question (things which exist by virtue of being specified): one way in

which meaning is grounded in the business world is in legal systems.

Simon Spero: http://www.w3.org/2007/03/RdfRDB/

Amanda Vizedom: The point on the current slide (titled "Consistency Check") is important. IME, most

folks developing ontologies to handle examples and/or instance-level data resist explicit

representation of instance-level examples, thereby losing this resource for testing...

Amanda Vizedom: I'm referring specifically to projects in which the ontologies are used for semantic

metadata, for example, and the bulk of data remain in RDBs or other data sources. Here, there is

principled reason to keep the instances out of the ontology being developed ...

Mike Bennett: @Amanda this is a very good point. One thing I hope to see developed later in this

conversation is the distinction between projects where the instance data is RDF/OWL individuals and

projects where the instance data is database instance data. So many issues require different

treatment in the two scenarios IMHO

Amanda Vizedom: However, there is good reason to ontologize the examples (some sample data, some

sample messages, some sample service payloads). It's fine to do it in a distinct ontology, for

example, using import or inheritance mechanisms to make the ontology under development usable within

the example ontology. Now you've got something to do some meaningful testing on.

Simon Spero: We're getting deep in to Quineland here; I'd settle for non-monotonicity.

Doug Foxvog: @Amanda Sample data can be placed in a model that uses a theory. Multiple models can use

the same theory, with the only difference being the instance data.

Doug Foxvog: It is a good idea to keep instance data out of theory ontolgies, imho.

Doug Foxvog: Some instances can be useful in theories. E.g., the Earth in a geographical theory, or a

legal code for a theory about how law applies to certain aspects of society.

Mike Bennett: @Doug there will always be a need for certain instances in most class-level ontologies

(e.g. the USA, ISO etc.), but that's distinct from the sample data question, which I agree is an

important one

Amanda Vizedom: @Mike Yes, I agree. In fact, this relates to our previous discussion of training

suitability to project. Much SemWeb-oriented training tends to assume that the instance data is

RDF/OWL, and to teach specific approaches (some elements of which we've discussed in last 2 days,

e.g. DL, no 2nd-order classes, no properties relating classes (as opposed to their instances),

etc....

Mike Bennett: @Amanda - yes, to many sem-webbers the OWL/RDF web /is/ the uiverse of semantics.

People need to hear what John's saying about databases. All new, trendy movements assume a green

field site; the rest of us have to work with real world problems.

Simon Spero: The original web 0.9 took off because it integrated with all the data that was already

out there on the net

Simon Spero: It was a few years before http overtook gopher by traffic volume

Simon Spero: @Amanda, @Mike: the big problem with teaching OWL to people who know OOP is that

suddenly there's only monotonic inheritance

Amanda Vizedom: @Mike However, many interoperability-driven projects, including mine and I think

yours, do not fit this. Rather, there are legacy data sources, not to be converted any time soon, if

ever, and the ontology is providing the explicit semantics absent from those sources (via markup or

indexing or wrapped services or...). For very good reasons, the sample data shouldn't be in these

ontologies. But we miss a much needed means of machine- or machine-assisted validation by not also,

separately, ontologizing some instance level data to serve as a test bed.

Simon Spero: @Mike, @amanda: the link I posted earlier is to a W3 workshop on mapping from RDF to

RDBMSes

Mike Bennett: @Amanda - indeed so. Some of the bright young things in financial services want to "do"

trendy SemWeb stuff, but most of them have real problems to solve. Since there's no merit in having

instance data in two places, it only makes sense for the ontology to be a business conceptual model

within a model driven stack of artefacts. But the test question is an interesting one, thanks for

flagging that up.

Simon Spero: @myself - and RDBMS -> RDF

Mike Bennett: @Simon interesting link, it might help with some of the places where users of our

ontology are looking at ways to use it in solving real data problems.

Simon Spero: Mike: Best way to convince people that they don't want a jumbo triple store is to let

them build one

Simon Spero: Nothing like a giga-tuple table to slap some sense into the resistant

Mike Bennett: @Simon re monotonic inheritance that explains why one sees ontologies with a single

hierarchy. I think there are interesting data mapping issues that require multiple inheritance in

the ontology mapping to distinct single inheritance data models across the organization or supply

chain.

Simon Spero: @Mike: multi is ok, but people want to override, because that's what they do when

programming

Amanda Vizedom: ...By doing so, we not only enable the kind of single-ontology checking John

described, but loads of potential additional testing, including testing of the implications of

particular alignments of ontologies, when such are needed for federated search, for example. Test

those alignments over test beds of ontologized instance-level examples that stand in for the

heterogeneous sources you aim to make interoperable.

anonymous morphed into Ali Hashemi

Simon Spero: Word & Object says we can't

Ali Hashemi: Sorry for being super late, was in a meeting till now...

Mike Bennett: We're on Slide 10 (the 3D 4D question as an example of different theories)

Ali Hashemi: (thanks)

Mike Bennett: This makes a lot of sense. I think in 4D anyway and was completely blindsided by the

fact that there are 3D theorists with their own peculiar definitions for continuants and the like.

Simon Spero: Perdurphiles

Mike Bennett: It should be possible to frame a definition for "Continuant" which corresponds to what

John calls the Interface view - what it actually is, rather than how a 3D or 4D geek defines it

Simon Spero: Are there individual rabbits, or are there just disconnected chunks of the unique Rabbit

Ali Hashemi: One comment about Slide 7 -- the lattice need not be a tree. There can be more than one

parent, and more than one root for any applied snippet of the "lattice of theories"

Ali Hashemi: I suppose the emphasized word is _like_ a tree

Mike Bennett: <cheer!>

Mike Bennett: That's re the questioner suggesting that these theorists come up with some real axioms

for their stuff

Doug Foxvog: "Connected" in 3D and 4D have different definitions. The axioms do not conflict unless

they are using terms with inconsistant meanings.

Doug Foxvog: Equating in 3D and 4D also have different meanings.

Mike Bennett: Surely once we look at real axioms, one workaround that drops right out of real world

data is that there is a thing which exists over a period of time (howsoever modeled), and that thing

has a number of states and transitions between those states (again, howsoever modeled).

Doug Foxvog: @Mike: what is considered to be a "thing" is a mental definition.

Mike Bennett: @Doug surely the theorists aren't getting hung up on words just because some words may

have different meanings?

Mike Bennett: @Doug good point

Simon Spero: Can we sum this up as saying hooray for empiricism?

Simon Spero: If there words could have two meanings, there would have been a sign on the dooor.

Mike Bennett: @Simon: Philosophy Department (or is it?)

Simon Spero: Enterprise architecture is basically enterprise archaeology

Simon Spero: Or forensic para-consistent epistemology : What the f*ck were they thinking?

Simon Spero: BTW, DICOM has 11 values for sex:

ftp://medical.nema.org/medical/dicom/final/cp373_ft.pdf

Simon Spero: Medical imaging quantised gender theory, because it had to

Amanda Vizedom: IMHO, it would be of significant value were some research ontologists (i.e., those

for whom doing what follows would count as fulfilling the expectations of their positions, vs. those

for whom applied projects dominate) would pony-up with those axioms and proofs. Here's why: groups

of applied ontologists sometimes get into interminable debates, running years at times, over which

of two logically equivalent high-level representation approaches to use. In absence of agreement,

they also end up using each sometimes. Some will argue for equivalence and the practical importance

of picking one and moving on, but without the proof, this is rarely persuasive.

Mike Bennett: @Amanda re our earlier (my email is down just now): Another twitter response has

@MikeHypercube methinks: "..Ontologies play a vital role in the broad Semantic Web Project vision,

the burgeoning Web of Linked Data .."

Simon Spero: What's the #tag?

Mike Bennett: @Simon in fact the world's first "non gender" person was declared in Aus in the last

couple of days. Cue database confusion.

Simon Spero: Mike: Gender != Sex

Mike Bennett: :Simon The #tag for Linked Data is #linkeddata if that's what you're asking (apologies

if not)

Simon Spero: Oh - that tag

Doug Foxvog: "We have reality" -- that's a theory. We have an "interface" to what we consider to be

reality.

Doug Foxvog: Hopefully, there is some sort of agreement as to what "reality" is.

Amanda Vizedom: I could make a list ... but I won't. [Note re: Summit topic -- this would be nice to

cover in teaching as well: recognizing logically equivalent, or probably logically equivalent,

modeling approaches, and making choices -- either pragmatically or arbitrarily!

Mike Bennett: I think that there is a real case for a repository that identifies industry-led

standards (at a semantic level, where such exist), so that one can start to integrate the lattice of

actual, owned theories that are out threre.

Mike Bennett: With provenance metadata

Mike Bennett: Unified ontology?

Amanda Vizedom: @Mike +1

Simon Spero: There's a workshop on ontology repositories at eswc in corfu this year

Peter P. Yim: The "Shared and Integrated Ontologies (SIO)" project is born!

Mike Bennett: Thanks Peter.

Peter P. Yim: HUGE Thanks to *John* and All

Peter P. Yim: -- session ended 5:30pm --

-- end of chat session --

  • ... More Questions
    • For those who have further questions or remarks on the topic, please post them to the [ontolog-forum] so that everyone in the community can benefit from the discourse.
  • Session ended 5:30 pm PST

Audio Recording of this Session

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  • Conference Date and Time: 16-Mar-2010 3:45pm ~ 5:30 pm EDT
  • Duration of Recording: 1 Hour 43 Minutes
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