Saturday, November 26, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
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ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group
It is a working group of
Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)
Communication from Cory
Thanks John,
I would like to follow up on the precision line of thought.
As one who generally likes precision (or at least more than most), I have to admit to not having achieve it to the extent that would be required to some of the goals attributed to Ontologies.
Specifically the goals of the automatic and autonomous integration and adaptation of formally unrelated systems. This generally takes the form of matching interfaces or data schema.
The problem with this goal is that it rarely achieved by very intelligent and informed people. In general, compatibility between systems is achieved with interaction, negotiation and sometimes mutual adaptation. Expecting that a set of specifications are going to be sufficiently precise, detailed, sufficient and contextual to allow for autonomous adaptation is hard to accept.
If it is possible it would require GREAT effort to ground all of the specifications. Even after such effort it is improbable that the adaptation would be TRUSTED without human inspection and testing. On the other hand, less formally grounded specifications with some tools that seem quite possible could AID the process of adaptation, making it one or 2 orders of magnitude faster and less expensive.
For example, if a set of interfaces were mapped to something like wordnet, it is easy to see how tools would help the human make connections between interfaces by matching the concepts. If it were correct 75% of the time - that would be a big win!
Add a little more semantics and you can improve the win, but at some point there is diminishing returns.
To make this possible the interfaces have to have a common conceptual framework (which is why we are working on the meta level) as well as the capability to "ground" domain concepts in ONE OR MORE "hubs", like wordnet or even Cyc. We can then see a community of tools that would help derive value from this grounded knowledge.
The other thing necessary to make this possible is to accept that models are not perfect and allow statements that may be partially true or true within a limited context.
So yes, we have to understand what our value proposition is for various levels of precision and be realistic about what can be fully automated even with such the precision control "turned all the way up".
Cory