August 10, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
à
ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group
It is a working group of
Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)
A focused position statement
on the notions that has been briefly discussed here regarding the artificiality
of semantic web ontologies is at [bead 188]
Communicated to http://protege.stanford.edu/community/subscribe.html
Hello everybody,
I'm looking for an ontology describing company (model (plc, limited,...),
sector of activity, specialties, and so on).
Does someone know something like that?
Thanks a lot.
Best regards.
Frédéric
Interestingly enough, Dorothy Denning and Jeff Long developed something called "ultrastructure" in the early 1980s, with a focus on the ontology of companies, as one of the targets of investigation.
A goggle search "ultrastructure denning long" gives
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=204892
as first hit... but one has to pay to read the article.
http://hermes.circ.gwu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0201&L=cybcom&O=A&F=&S=&P=249
has the text:
Can Alex or others advise if the term "structural
information" is used in
the same way as by:
1. De Vany, A. 1998, 'How much information is there in an economic
organization and why can't large ones be optimal?' Brazilian Electronic
Journal of Economics, July 1,
< http://www.beje.decon.ufpe.br/vany/information.htm >.
2. Long, J.G. & Denning, D.E. 1995, 'Ultra-structure: A design
Theory for
Complex Systems and Processes', Communications of the ACM, 38:1, pp.
103-19,
January.
De Vany makes a distinction between "structural" information
for building a system and "process" information for maintenance of
the system. While Long & Denning
describe "Ultra-structure" that seem to make a similar distinction being based on two hypotheses.
(i) Operating rules that change over time but which can be grouped into a small
number of classes that describe "ruleforms" that do not change over
time. (ii) "Complex Operating Rule
Engines (CORE) consisting of less than 50 ruleforms, that are sufficient to
represent all rules found among systems sharing a broad family
resemblance" (Long & Denning 1995: 103).
Regards
etc.
I know both Denning and Long and the history of the non-adoption of something like ultrastructure. My own work is on a stratified theory of ontology
http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/book.htm
which shares a lot with ultrastructure. John Sowa's work as well as Richard Ballard's work on "semantic primitives" are related in precisely the sense that the semantic primitives are treated as if atoms and a physical theory of events (business events even). Tom Adi's work on primitives is perhaps the best that I know:
http://www.bcngroup.org/beadgames/generativeMethodology/AdiStructuredOntology-PartI.htm
The non-adoption appears to be because stratified ontology requires a deeper understanding of general systems theory than is commonly available to computer scientists and business people.
I hope this helps.
Paul Prueitt
Taos, New Mexico