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 August 10, 2005

 The BCNGroup Beadgames

National Project à 

Challenge Problem  à

 Center of Excellence Proposal à

 

Discussion about ONTAC forum

ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group

It is a working group of

Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)

 

Regarding the direction IT has taken us

 

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