Different goals for ontologies

[gprimero]

I'd like to ask you if you have some ideas, or some bibliographic
references, about this issue: which different goals might be proposed
for ontologies, how different goals might be in conflict, how
different tools might be more or less effective for a specific goal,
how one or several ontologies can be assessed according to its
usefulness for a specific goal, which examples might be analysed in
order to think about this topic.

Regards,
Gerardo.

[Alan Rector]

Gerardo

We've written a number of things. One of mantras for ontology development is "What's it for?"

I also recommend getting the relevant deliverable from their previous and current EU projects from Dipak Kalra <d.k...@ucl.ac.uk>. D6.1 from Semantic Health on semantic interoperability, plus a similar deliverable from a more recent project.



A few references below to our work. Several of these papers address the question obliquely - a major issue with medical ontologies/terminologies is that they are expected to serve so many different, and potentially conflicting, functions. There will also be reference to this topic in my upcoming keynote at ICBO that will appear in July on my home page: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~rector and some references in the recent Keynote from DL-2012, also on my web site.

Hope this helps

Alan

-----------------------
Alan Rector
Professor of Medical Informatics
School of Computer Science
University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL, UK
TEL +44 (0) 161 275 6149/6188
FAX +44 (0) 161 275 6204
www.cs.man.ac.uk/~rector
www.co-ode.org
http://clahrc-gm.nihr.ac.uk/
====================================================
J. Rogers, A.L. Rector: Terminological Systems: Bridging the generation gap. Proc. AMIA Fall Symposium: Nashville: Hanley and Belfus (1997), 610-614.

A.L. Rector: Thesauri and formal classifications: Terminologies for people and machines, Methods of Information in Medicine 37 (1998), 501-509.

A.L. Rector: Clinical Terminology: Why is it so hard?, Methods of Information in Medicine 38 (1999), 239-252.

A.L. Rector, P.E. Zanstra, W.D. Solomon et al.: Reconciling users’ needs and formal requirements: Issues in developing a re-usable ontology for medicine, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in BioMedicine 2 (1999), 229-242.

A. Rector, R. Qamar, T. Marley: Binding ontologies and coding systems to electronic health records and messages, Applied Ontology 4 (2009), 51-69.

A. Rector: Knowledge driven software and “fractal tailoring”: Ontologies in development environments for clinical systems. Proc. Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2010): IOS Press (2010), 17-30.

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[Cristian Cocos]

As a species of the (by now venerable) field of Knowledge Representation
(KR), "ontologies" obviously have all the goals KR activities have,
though I imagine you're looking for something more than just this, right?

C

[Alan Rector]

On 12 Jun 2012, at 16:14, Cristian Cocos wrote:

> As a species of the (by now venerable) field of Knowledge Representation (KR), "ontologies" obviously have all the goals KR activities have, though I imagine you're looking for something more than just this, right?

NO!

If the term "ontologies" has any distinctive meaning, it is as a part of KR - that part that deals with universal propositions (or if you prefer "universal knowledge" or just "universals"). KR as a whole is much broader. There is much knowledge that is "particular" - e.g. that the incidence of drug resistant malaria is rising - or that Columbus discovered America - that is certainly knowledge but isn't "ontology".

Regards

Alan

>
> C
>
> On 5/17/2012 11:38 PM, gprimero wrote:
>> I'd like to ask you if you have some ideas, or some bibliographic
>> references, about this issue: which different goals might be proposed
>> for ontologies, how different goals might be in conflict, how
>> different tools might be more or less effective for a specific goal,
>> how one or several ontologies can be assessed according to its
>> usefulness for a specific goal, which examples might be analysed in
>> order to think about this topic.
>

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>

[Stefan Schulz]

>
>> As a species of the (by now venerable) field of Knowledge Representation (KR), "ontologies" obviously have all the goals KR activities have, though I imagine you're looking for something more than just this, right?
>
> NO!
>
> If the term "ontologies" has any distinctive meaning, it is as a part of KR - that part that deals with universal propositions (or if you prefer "universal knowledge" or just "universals"). KR as a whole is much broader.

There is much knowledge that is "particular" - e.g. that the incidence
of drug resistant malaria is rising - or that Columbus discovered
America -  that is certainly knowledge but isn't "ontology".

I fully agree with Alan, see also:
Schulz S, Stenzhorn H, Boeker M, Smith B: Strengths and limitations of
formal ontologies in the biomedical domain.
RECIIS - Electronic Journal in Communication, Information and
Innovation in Health, 2009; 3 (1): 31-45:
http://dx.doi.org/10.3395/reciis.v3i1.241en

Best regards,

Stefan

[Cristian Cocos]

On 6/13/2012 02:30 AM, Alan Rector wrote:
>> As a species of the (by now venerable) field of Knowledge Representation (KR), "ontologies" obviously have all the goals KR activities have, though I imagine you're looking for something more than just this, right?
> NO!

Is that "no" as in "no, he is not looking for anything more that this,"
or is that something else? Otherwise, as a species of KR (which both you
and Stefan seem to find indisputable--see quote below), "ontologies"
surely have all the features common to all KR species, and this by
virtue of subsumption alone. Otherwise, I am afraid I cannot really see
your point.

[Gerardo Primero]

Ontologies might have some goals that are not shared by all KR species. What I'm looking for is (1) a list of possible goals for ontologies (including goals shared and not shared by all KR species), (2) a list of possible conflicts between those goals, (3) a list of assessment tools that allow us to measure the degree of pragmatic adequacy of an ontology artifact in relation with a specific goal.

Regards,
Gerardo.

--- El mié 13-jun-12, Cristian Cocos <cris...@gmail.com> escribió:

[Alan Rector]

On 13 Jun 2012, at 14:55, Cristian Cocos wrote:

> On 6/13/2012 02:30 AM, Alan Rector wrote:
>>> As a species of the (by now venerable) field of Knowledge Representation (KR), "ontologies" obviously have all the goals KR activities have, though I imagine you're looking for something more than just this, right?
>> NO!
>
> Is that "no" as in "no, he is not looking for anything more that this," or is that something else? Otherwise, as a species of KR (which both you and Stefan seem to find indisputable--see quote below), "ontologies" surely have all the features common to all KR species, and this by virtue of subsumption alone. Otherwise, I am afraid I cannot really see your point.

That's "no" to the phrase "all the goals KR activities have". Ontologies address only a SOME of the goals that KR has, namely those to do with "universal knowledge" or, if you prefer, definitions and essential properties. And no, it is not true that '"ontologies" surely have all the features common to all KR species'. Many KR species are concerned with things explicitly excluded from ontologies - e.g. linguistic knowledge, pragmatic/associational knowledge, defaults and exceptions, probabilistic knowedge, etc. plus simple facts about the world, e.g. "Aspirin is licensed by the FDA for use in prevention of heart disease but only in doses of 75mg/day". In short, "ontology" is part of KR, not all of KR, nor a synonym for KR.

Alan

[Bill Hogan]

+1 to Alan.

To quote Stefan Schulz: "Ontologies are not Swiss Army knives for
knowledge representation", no matter how hard people try to make them
such, nor how prevalent such efforts seem to be.

Bill