AKICILJ

[green_amber]

I just asked (poor sweet) easterbunny this but it occurs to me I may as well ask y'all..

Does the Semantic Web imply the need for one ontology to rule them all? I can see how you can map/join ontologies that are contiguous and (hopefully) exclusive eg one for mammals and one for invertebrates, so you end up with an ontology of animals? . But supposing you're trying to develop an ontology for tax law? A German lawyer will see different concept, in different orders of precedence, and use different phrases (even after translation) than a UK lawyer or a US lawyer. Can all 3 start working independently on their ontologies and eventually usefully share data in applications, or do they all have to agree an ontology at scratch (which just ain't going to happen?)

This is after lunch with Burkhard the mad German ontologist :-)

In other news, I am off to PloktaPi tomorrow - yay! - on the train, not plane, partly as a compromise with work/life balance; I have great hopes of getting most my essays marked on the train. ( don't tell the AUT ). Getting hair cut a.m. to look bootiful, and have bought lotsa new clothes with mother on Tuesday, some of which may accompany me:-) In particular, I acquired a rather wonderful ecru linen transparent coat thing in Per Una to go over a brown/cream sundress, which I think looks rather Katherine Zeta Jones altogether, for my brother's wedding in JUne -- a pic may follow . Sunday is supposed to be a trip to the revamped tate Modern with peter_crump and altogether I think I Need a Break and Oh Good I've Got One! (many thanks to bohemiancoast for putting up with me again..)

Comments

[easterbunny.livejournal.com]

focusing on the ontology as the main aim is almost always a mistake.

I'm not sure I agree with this. The people in my workgroup (loosely pulled together as "intelligent resource discovery") are all approaching ontologies from a different angle. One guy has a specfic application in mind for which he has developed a small, lean mean ontology. He gets major, "Wow, you made it do something useful!" stars. There's a guy building one from scratch that describes the universe. He's having to wade through a lot of domain knowledge disputes (is "wolf rayet" a star or a galaxy). I've been translating 2 community standard XML schemas into ontologies because I want to see if I can do something with a .owl format and its implied relationship / logic that can't be done with the .xsd formats we've had knocking around for 3 years. I have another 3 months to demonstrate that the solution-first-problem-second approach has a point; after that time it is entirely possible that guy #1 will be the only one with funding and they will find a different way for me to gouge the taxpayer make a useful contribution to space. If I can't build ontologies I want to bake space cookies.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Funny. I want to know about this stuff because it might enliven my life - not because I think law really needs it. I am such a fraud :-)
Is anyone using an ontogy/SW application for an actual working practical project yet?

[easterbunny.livejournal.com]

When I had a look last summer, it's largely medical researchers, particularly in genetics and cancer research. Links to look for include Gene Ontology, Oncology Ontology, and the Open Biomedical Ontology Database.

The US military is testing out ontologies to automate battlefield decisions, but I don't have any links to the talks I heard last summer.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

re: the US work, this is all linked in with what they're calling Network-Centric Warfare and Battlespace Management, which they've been working on for at least the last five years. The OWL language developed from DAML (the DARPA Agent Markup Language) which began in 2000, and that program has direct antecedents within US defense research going back to the early-to-mid 1990s.

The UK has similar programmes under the name of Network-Enabled Capabilities, which also mesh with NATO-wide efforts to revise the LC2IEDM datamodel vocabulary that are widely used in military planning systems.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure - in research terms we still have a lot to learn about how to use ontologies and the Semantic Web, so if your success criterion is "What will push back the boundaries of human knowledge?" or more venially "What will get me more grants?" then you're likely to come to a different decision about ontology-first than if it's "What will get me a system that is useful in practice?".

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Cool - are any/all of these ontologies available online?

Another of the projects I work on at Southampton is a collaboration with our chemists, who are investigating ontologies and the SW simply because they've realised the expressive limitations of XML vocabularies such as CML.