| Number | 95 |
|---|---|
| Duration | 1 hour60 minute 3,600 second 0.0417 day |
| Date/Time | January 14 2022 19:00 GMT |
| 11:00am PST/2:00pm EST | |
| 7:00pm GMT/8:00pm CET | |
| Convener | Andrea Westerinen |
IAOA Semantic Web Applied Ontology (SWAO) SIG
THIS MEETING TOOK PLACE ON FRIDAY 14 JANUARY 2022. (Meetings have moved to the second Friday of the month at 2pm Eastern Time.)
- We use Zoom for these meetings - details at Connection Details
Agenda
- Actions from last meeting
- RobertR liaison status with the IAOA Education Committee still has not occurred since no meetings have yet been held
- Discussion/presentation of RobertR's ontology definitions spreadsheet
- Discussion of the MIRO article
- Continued discussion of ontology and knowledge graph definitions from the December SWAO meeting
- Posted in this document
- Housekeeping and next meeting
- AoB
Proceedings
- Preliminary discussion about the antifraud ontology announced on the Ontology Forum distribution list
- GAO Antifraud Resource is based on GAO’s Fraud Ontology — "a rigorous classification of fraud schemes affecting federal programs and operations—serves as the backbone for understanding, evaluating, and measuring all aspects of federal fraud schemes, including their participants, mechanisms, and impacts"
- The site provides a user friendly, web-based platform for interacting with the model and identifying resources to support fraud risk management
- This project was overviewed by Leia Dickerson in the 2021 Ontology Summit series
- Question was raised whether this could be more integrated with cyber security
- GAO Antifraud Resource is based on GAO’s Fraud Ontology — "a rigorous classification of fraud schemes affecting federal programs and operations—serves as the backbone for understanding, evaluating, and measuring all aspects of federal fraud schemes, including their participants, mechanisms, and impacts"
- For the next 6 months or so, SWAO will need another individual to run the meetings (AndreaW has several other commitments, as does MikeB)
- Either ToddS or KenB will run the sessions for the coming months
- AndreaW updated the SWAO meeting connection details to reflect KenB's Zoom information
- Discussion of upper ontologies migrated to a discussion of IOF (Industry Ontology Foundry)
- There is concern that all upper ontologies could be rejected due to issues with one (such as BFO)
- BFO issues include the requirement for realism and the lack of multiple inheritance
- Committing to an upper ontology means committing to its conceptual distinctions
- These need to be evaluated that they are relevant and consistent with the desired world view for the ontology to be developed
- Is valuable to understand where BFO is used and where it is used but its issues are "worked around"
- The majority of the following insights on IOF were provided by ToddS:
- Development principles for IOF are in harmony with OntoCommons
- IOF is less concerned about BFO's requirement of realism and more concerned with 'practical application' for physics and mathematics for manufacturing
- IOF Core to be released soon, with BFO formally embedded
- A release where BFO is "hidden" has also been discussed as a possibility
- Discussion of the MIRO article
- MIRO is the acronym for "Minimum Information for Reporting an Ontology"
- Provides a set of guidelines to facilitate consistency and completeness when documenting published ontologies
- There are 7 areas for documentation, and 3-11 guidelines within each area (34 guidelines total)
- 28 guidelines are MUSTs, 3 SHOULDs and 3 OPTIONALs
- Topic areas are 'basics', motivation, scope and dev community, knowledge acquisition, content, change mgmt, and testing/QA
- It was noted that this seems heavy but can be valuable for very large, heavily referenced/reused ontologies
- As part of the discussion, 'incremental development of semantics' was discussed
- This is addressed in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Applied Ontology, "
- The theory is to add data to an ontology/knowledge graph and then fix the ontology in order to support it
- This is as opposed to a top-down/upper ontology definitional approach
- The underlying definition of the concepts is in TypeScript
- Discussion of ontology concepts by RobertR
- Need alternate wording than upper/top-level/... ontology since these imply direction and specific architectures, as opposed to intent
- "Core" implies "center" with other ontologies extending from it or layering around it
- "Upper" implies that other ontologies are below it and that there are levels of gradation
- "Top-level" vs "foundational" imply that other ontologies are "below"/"above" them
- For example, in computer science, hierarchies are typically drawn with the most general at the top, whereas in biology, the most general is at the bottom
- "Conceptual" ontology could be either broader or narrower
- "General", "generic", "common" ontology may be more appropriate names
- Take-aways:
- Important to have definitions for the various types of ontologies
- Should explore the possible architectures of linked ontologies with varying degrees of generality
- Does it matter if an ontology is only categorical or abstract, or also includes instances?
- Important to understand how the world is perceived/partitioned, and put the conceptual archetypes within that structure
- For example, "prescribed vs described", "occurrent vs endurant", "dependent/relative/mediating", "concrete vs abstract" , ...
- Important to define these concepts and then assess whether they are needed when developing an ontology
- Need to distinguish between "truth makers" (what something is/semantic building blocks) and the data that one has about the thing
- Also need to understand the quality of the data
- Need alternate wording than upper/top-level/... ontology since these imply direction and specific architectures, as opposed to intent
Next Meeting
The next meeting will occur on February 11, 2022, at 19:00 GMT/2pm EST.
Attendees
- Ken Baclawski
- Mike Bennett
- Robert Rovetto
- Todd Schneider
- Andrea Westerinen