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> Roger L. Costello wrote: > > > The namespace of the elements indicates the Ontology. As I mentioned > > earlier, an Ontology can evolve in a distributed fashion. There need > > not be a centralized committee of experts. Besides, even if there was, > > I would argue that creating a centralized committee to create a logical > > design (i.e., an Ontology), and then allowing (encouraging!) diversity > > of physical expressions ain't a bad way to go! > > > > Naturally, you will most likely want to involve domain experts in > > deciding what are the fundamental terms and their relationships. > > Some of the most interesting (practical) results in this area are in > reverse engineering ontologies and domain models from existing data > sources. That is, knowledge scraping seems to work as well or better > than any top down approach - which is both consistent with Web > technologies and avoids streaks of NIH, which tends to plague > ontology work. I had to read this twice. The first time I thought you meant the (in)famous National Institute of Health C++ class library which stubbornly imported the Smalltalk idea of crushing the entire world into a single abstract class hierarchy. It was the centerpiece of the debate over the epic OO debate between inheritance-based polymorphism and generic programming. Then I figured perhaps you mean "Not invented here". The funny thing is that both of these facets of "NIH" are deadly to any ambitions of ontologies in real life, and I've seen dangerous elements of both in ontological work in the field. I think that for ontologies to work, they should be very careful about minimizing rigid constructs, which most often mean favoring local constraints over explicit interitance. Almost everytime I run into entailment problems in OWL-like languages, there is concrete subClassOf lurking nearby. Developers should also be very conscientious about seeking out ontologies developed by other parties for import, rather than reinventing the wheel. I think this is much more important than worrying about whether the other ontology is *just* the right fit for your application. -- Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc. http://uche.ogbuji.net http://4Suite.org http://fourthought.com Gems From the [Python/XML] Archives - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/04/09/py-xm l.html Introducing N-Triples - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-thi nk17/index.html Use internal references in XML vocabularies - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerw orks/xml/library/x-tipvocab.html EXSLT by example - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-exslt.html The worry about program wizards - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=7238 Use rdf:about and rdf:ID effectively in RDF/XML - http://www-106.ibm.com/develo perworks/xml/library/x-tiprdfai.html
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