OWG Debate: Results
Juan Llorens
Dear all,
Thank you very very much for such lovely debates. I hope that we can manage to maintain that level the year along 😊
After this period of debate, I think that we are (hopefully) ready to go on. Let me try to sum-up and propose some decisions
1-) Communication issues
In regards to Davy’s question about webex, I will ask Anabel to ask INCOSE to organize a audio conference system when our regular meeting takes place (at IW and IS). INCOSE provides it’s own system and the only thing we have to do is ask for it in advance so that they assign us a room with this kind of facility.
2-) Debate
I agree with Davy in that Knowledge Management is not reduced to Ontology. This is, indeed, the reason why I wanted to promote the Knowledge Management title to the group. The reason why I wanted to maintain the Ontology term in the title was simply administrative: to avoid misunderstandings from INCOSE Side and from our users. INCOSE Central has been dealing with our group as Ontology and with the old Knowledge Management group for the handbook. It seems a bit “too quick” for everybody if, suddenly, the Ontology group disappears.
When I created the WG, my intention was NOT to work only on Ontologies: It was to work on Knowledge Management at large (including ontologies engineering and applications), but I could not use the KM name for the working group because it already existed, and used for doing a completely different work than what the name stands for.
I’ll try to explain my position a bit more in detail (not too much.. I don’t want to be an academician 😊).
The concept of knowledge management was coined in the early 1990s in Japan (I. Nonaka, "The knowledge creating company", Harvard Business Review, number 69, 1991: 96–104) trying to find new means to improve productivity in their manufacturing systems. I include a common image of what we understand more or less about the topic today.
On the other side, as a means to formalize and represent knowledge, the Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) (KOS: Knowledge Organization Systems. http://www.iva.dk/bh/lifeboat_ko/concepts/knowledge_organization_systems.htm) were very good proposals from Information Science. Assorted models proposed by diverse disciplines, are taxonomies, glossaries, thesauri (ISO 2788), topic maps (ISO 13250), ontologies (T. Gruber. Model formulation as a problem-solving task: computer-assisted engineering modeling. In Knowledge Acquisition as Modeling, 1993, pp. 105-127, John Wiley, New York, NY, USA), SKOS, etc.
Some of the researchers, me among them, started to consider in the 199X that Software models like UML models represented also knowledge structures (indeed, this was it was my PhD in 1996). This tendency is now getting bigger and bigger, including Systems Engineering work-products as well (Structural & Dynamic models (SysML) , physical models (Modelica), Simulations, FMI/FMU, etc.)
From another point of view, the Artificial Intelligence Domain (John McCarthy) contributed to the field with their Knowledge Engineering approach, where expert systems, inference engines, and Ontology were the kernel.
The Information Science community also suggested that Information retrieval (Salton, Robertson, etc) and search engines were kernel for managing knowledge.
I this “soup” I feel comfortable. I like Ontology as a means to represent and use knowledge, but I think it must not be everything. We need means to bring knowledge close to humans (Usability, reuse, visualization, retrieval, chat boxes, semantic web) and to computers (Machine learning algorithms, inference systems, big data, data fusion, etc.).
But, however, something was CLEAR from my side since the beginning. I didn’t want to create a WG for theoretical, foundational and scientific debates. I think that this approach really fits well at the Systems Science WG. This group is SUPERIOR for digging in the essentials of SE: and knowledge is ,of course, among them, as Jack, Bob, James, Davy, Yannick and all of you point out. So I thought that we should leave this group to do its great job.
Our group was thought from my side as a really practical WG, where the outcomes should be relevant and (if possible) applicable assets to the organizations as turn-key products. It is clear for me that, of course, we have to debate about theoretical aspects when necessary, but it must not be our goal. In my dreams I was thinking that the WG should provide outcomes like, for example:
- A practical guide-book for applying the Knowledge Management process of the ISO 15288 to a large and distributed organization.
- A proposal of Ontology for supporting the ISO 26262 for Road vehicles – Functional safety, allowing its application for managing the quality of models and Requirements
- A proposal of a standard for sharing and reusing terminology all along the SE development life-cycle.
- Design and definition of methods for inferring new knowledge from existing & previously-developed models, or designs: patterns identification, representation and reuse.
- New paradigms for solving the archiving problems of certification oriented companies, like aerospace and defense (Information obsolescence and its problems with access to it, retrieval and eventually reuse it)
- And many many other issues concerning Knowledge Management, BUT in the frame of Systems Engineering, of course.
Consider, from my perspective, a successful use case the work done by Bob Sherman at P&G. A real case of knowledge management inside Systems Engineering domain. Thanks again Bob 😊
3-) Name decision.
After the lovely debate with the emails, I have grouped all the results and, considering that I agree with Yannick’s proposal to change the order and vote for him, the results are:
|
Ontology-Based KM WG |
Davy |
||||||
|
KM via Ontology WG |
Davy |
||||||
|
Knowledge-Based SE |
James |
||||||
|
Ontology & Knowledge Management |
Yannick |
Bob |
Juan |
Lan |
Anabel |
Chema |
Jose |
|
Systems Knowledge Ontology |
Bob |
||||||
|
Systems Engineering Knowledge Management |
Yannick |
||||||
|
OntoSystemics |
James |
Mingyu |
So, as results of the debate, I will update the WG charter, send it to you and to David for formal update
Well, sorry for this long email.. and BIG HUGS TO ALL
Juan
----------------------------------------------
Prof. Juan Llorens
Informatics Dept.- EPS Leganes
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Avda Universidad 30
28911 Leganes - Madrid
Spain
Tel: +34916249498
Fax: +34916249129
e-mail Juan.L...@uc3m.es
http://www.linkedin.com/in/llorensjuan
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Juan_Llorens/
----------------------------------------------
Juan Llorens
Dear all,
I have received this email from Richard Martin. I put it in the loop.
Anabel: could you please see if he is member of the WG? Thanks 😊
Richard. Thanks for your advices. I will do my best to concentrate the WG within the less general and common Ontology & KM issues and let the topics more unique for our WG to pop-up by themselves.
All: This WG is NOT mine. It is yours. If you want to contribute, you´ll lead the group. If you do not contribute, you´ll see where it goes with no influence in the selected path. As you remember, I would like the group to be organized around projects. The only I would like you guys to do is that, if a project starts putting members together, you communicate it to the WG leaders (today they are Anabel and me) so that we can account the project, sell the project within INCOSE, and ask for the progression and results.
In this context, I would like Swami to promote his project and ask for collaborators.. Swami and Anabel, are you on your way to prepare an official presentation of Swami’s project using a teleconference for all the members of the WG?
Hugs to all
Juan
From: Richard Martin [mailto:rich...@tinwisle.com]
Sent: Monday, February 12, 2018 5:44 PM
To: Juan Llorens <llo...@inf.uc3m.es>
Subject: RE: [onto4se] OWG Debate: Results
Juan,
While I appreciate your interest in knowledge management, I am concerned that the topic is far too broad for an INCOSE WG. In fact, I can claim that all of the current WG’s are working in the area of ‘knowledge management’ in one way or another. There are specific methods and techniques that have over the past several decades been collectively called ‘knowledge management’ but your response below implies considerably more than the identification of those methods and techniques as they apply to SE. Many of them are already being used in SE, particularly by INCOSE members.
On the other hand, the topic of SE ontology, especially the relationships among different expressions of SE ontology, is very relevant to INCOSE. As the number of working groups increases, I find that the lexicon and taxonomy of terms used across INCOSE is increasing. Part of this occurs because of the new subject matter of relevance to SE but some stems from the increase number of participants and the introduction of new perspectives in SE that they bring. While the underlying concepts are strikingly similar, hence our tendency for camaraderie and common purpose, the nuance associated with concept expression is increasingly diverse. In the extreme, we use the same term with rather different meaning and different terms for about same meaning. This trend to diversity in language use will continue as INCOSE grows.
Trying to homogenize SE language beyond specific contextual experience will always fail. There is not one SE ontology, there are many SE ontology, each resulting from a history of practice that will not and need not be overcome. Our collective need is to understand the diversity of language use that exists in contexts of interest to INCOSE members and then to relate as best we can concepts embedded in those languages and the different ways, i.e. variety of meaning, in which those concepts are expressed in different contexts – a very difficult task, but one worthy of effort.
I strongly urge you to sharpen the focus and purpose of your new working group toward a substantive outcome for INCOSE.
Cheers,
Richard
P.S. I tried sending this to the onto4se email but was rejected. Apparently I do not have permission to send email to that address even though it can send email to me.
--
You can see our wiki site for the Ontology WG at:
https://sites.google.com/site/onto4syseng/
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Onto4SE" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
onto4se+u...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to ont...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/onto4se.
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/onto4se/F110B33AB304AC4BA51BE4BBBAA2F25C827BE007%40DUMBO.KR.INF.UC3M.ES.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Jack Ring
<image002.jpg>
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/onto4se/F110B33AB304AC4BA51BE4BBBAA2F25C827BEA41%40DUMBO.KR.INF.UC3M.ES.
Sherman, Bob
All - I’m hearing consensus on what Jack summarized as “WG focus specifically on the KM and ontology aspects of SE”.
Richard – Regarding the following paragraph (from you)… when you mention “diversity of language”… are you referring to phenomena (or discipline) imposed diversity (e.g. electrical vs. mechanical vs. financial)? If not, could you give an example of such diversity?
Trying to homogenize SE language beyond specific contextual experience will always fail. There is not one SE ontology, there are many SE ontology, each resulting from a history of practice that will not and need not be overcome. Our collective need is to understand the diversity of language use that exists in contexts of interest to INCOSE members and then to relate as best we can concepts embedded in those languages and the different ways, i.e. variety of meaning, in which those concepts are expressed in different contexts – a very difficult task, but one worthy of effort.
Bob Sherman
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/onto4se/1D0269CB-6CBF-4E83-9BEA-0CF9BF324BC5%40gmail.com.