4/21/2004 9:21
AM
Key questions on Common Upper Ontology
Note from Dean Allemang
At the risk of putting words into the mouth of another, I was interested to hear what Deb McGuinness had to say on the topic of upper ontologies at the SDForum event this morning. I will not even attempt to represent her position, since that is not my place, but I will express an understanding I have come to, based on what I heard her say, filtered through my own interpretation/prejudices.
In the situations in which you can gain some form of consensus about a common vocabulary, and you can build this into a "starter ontology" that others extend (by adding new terms and classes), you reap many gains; interoperability becomes (relatively) easy, because you can map terms to themselves. Knowledge acquisition and gathering becomes (relatively) easy, because you have a set of terms that people can use to describe what they know/want to express. These things make for a very attractive environment.
However, the web (and in particular, web information systems like wikipedias and blogs) have shown us that there is a large amount of information that is being built up in advance of, or in the absence of, such an agreement, and while we would love to be able to impose some controlled vocabulary on these contexts, it is too late for some and socially inappropriate for others.
One beauty of the semantic web vision as expressed by TBL and manifest in the W3C standards is that it allows for both of these models - if you can build and agree upon an controlled vocabulary, good for you - you get all the advantages that come with it. If, however, you cannot do this, you still have an interoperable semantic graph model (and the "tube map" idea) to build something from the social, unstructured, or legacy web of information that is growing out there. And you can even gain from the nuances of situations in between.
All in all, this is a very attractive property for a technology (set of standards) to have.
Dean