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Saturday, December 10, 2005

 

 The BCNGroup Beadgames Index

 

 

 

Emergency Medical Ontology Project

as a

simultaneous policy

action

 

doing the homework

 

 

A project is firming up. 

 

The objective is to harvest concept definitions and express these concepts in the following ways

 

1) as a simple set of RDF statements, without any software hooks related to the inference engines such as Jena.

 

2) as a Topic Map using the Ontopia editor

 

3) as a set of syntagmatic triples, ie in the form { < a, r, b > }

 

As an exercise interesting to a large community of ontologists, we could target almost any "domain".  Practical matters suggest that we target the harvesting of information encoded (in some way) about the SARS outbreak last year, or any ontology about any aspect of flu origins, metabolic activity, genetic expression, transmission properties, social reactions to outbreaks, government/institutional response to fear of outbreak, or economic impact of biological challenges.

 

We can refer to all of these categories with the phrase;

 

biological threat management.

 

Since much of the US government is not focused on H5N1 flu issues, we need to link to the World Health Organization for the best current information

 

World Health Organization H5N1

 

The BCNGroup and associated organizations and individuals propose to develop a repository of information about reactions and preparations related to the H5N1 virus.

 

We are in particular interested in

 

Non-pharmaceutical interventions

 

One of our objectives would be to provide an active knowledge base (using Topic Maps) to provide details on WHO (World Health Organization) recommendations.

 

Some are suggesting that a project like this will fail for various reasons.  We point to an increasing maturity in the ontology community and the social interest in being prepared for a flu pandemic outbreak. 

 

Our sense is that past ontology development efforts have failed for reasons that can be listed – but that in listing these reasons one exposes oneself to narrowly defined agendas.  So the BCNGroup efforts must stay away from engaging, too deeply, in an analysis of why past projects have failed.

 

There is a sense, expressed by many, that there can be no proper response to the need for ontology mediation of human collective.  The structure of the social discussion is similar to that of the discussion about global warming.  (This statement is a claim based on observation, and might itself be considered to be controversial.)   We will just take this as a claim. 

 

A related claim is made by the simultaneous policy groups. The simultaneous policy claim is regarding the mutual control of concentrated economic power and the world political systems.  Again, we are merely makes a set of relationships about the situation that the ontology community is in now in late 2005.  John Sowa summed this situation up distinctly at [ 5 ].   

 

However, in spite of John’s informed judgment, we feel that the simultaneous policy group has identified the transformational process; and this involves just doing something.  But what?

 

The harvesting of RDF seems right because so many people have attempted to use RDF and OWL to develop operational ontology about biological threat management.  The use of the concepts being developed around the phrase

 

Service Oriented Architecture

 

also seems right.

 

However, and this is where we touch on controversy. 

 

OASIS Service Oriented Architecture

 

has been defining an architecture that is consistent with the Second School of Semantic Science.    To quote from the web page defining the difference between the First and Second school:

 

Simple Point of View:  Ontology mediation of human knowledge sharing assumes no role for deduction or other types of logical inference.  Ontology is simply a means to form community consensus and to make explicit some “sufficient” set of constructions.  link

 

It is important here to clearly state what this simple point of view DOES NOT MEAN.  The Second School states evidence that first order logics defined on precise representations of human concepts will serve in those cases where a fully engineered system has been defined and is sufficient to the task at hand.

 

So here, the First and Second Schools agree completely.  Web services are often about how engineered systems interoperate. 

 

The confusion that occurs starts with Tim Berners-Lee’s use of the phrase “semantic web” when he really should be referring to a distributed and fully engineered Internet environment.  Web services are then defined as engineered functions that are listed in a UDDI registry and which can be accessed by external similarly engineered functions.   For example IBM’s UDDI registry is completed and available at {link}, Microsoft’s is at {link}, SAP’s is at {link}.   Using the concepts of Service Oriented Architecture, the brand name of the service becomes unimportant, as does aspects of implementation such as programming language used internal to the organization. 

 

“Semantics” means “meaning”.  If we are in a fully engineered system we have a special situation.  In this situation, “semantic web” and “distributed and fully engineered Internet environment” are precisely and exactly the same. 

 

Control of parts or this entire distributed and fully engineered Internet environment has a value greater than the value of IBM, SAP and Microsoft combined.  This fact is part of the causes for controversy over the meaning of meaning. 

 

The value of an anticipatory web is far greater than one can imagine.  However, the theory grounding anticipatory technology has to take on issues related to function/(sub)structure aggregation.  (Please see short note at [ 281] )

 

The RoadMap for Semantic Technology Adoption define a path forward towards anticipatory technology based on aggregation of parts of ontology into a Topic Map.  This type of technology needs to have UDDI registries available as part of the overall architecture. 

 

However, human interaction in real time will need a Topic Map, or Topic Map type, technology so that the function, i.e. the meaning, of information is interpreted by humans, within human communities were knowledge sharing depends on social interaction.  This cannot be fully engineered.  (This statement is an opinion, of course.)

 

It seems reasonable that the annotation of social interaction will be done with the OASIS standard for Human Markup Language. 

 

We also note that the phrase “Semantic Execution Environment” is a phrase being used by OASIS members.