[Person-ontology] OWL for exchanging ontologies

[Pat Hayes]

>You can write sentences in natural language and come to an agreement
>on them. And this is often a very sensible thing to do, of course.
>
>
>I am glad to hear that,

I was being somewhat ironic, I hope you understood.

>But this is NOT writing axioms or comparing ontologies.
>
>
>I did not say that.

Well, actually you did, hence my rather acerbic email.

>  I say that before encoding ontology, there is some groundwork to be 
>done in plain english.

OK. What?

>To write OWL without having a set of diagrams and other standard 
>documetnation to work with, would be like coding without analysis 
>and design.

Well, again I disagree. OWL is not a programming code, and 
formalizing knowledge is not like programming. To a large extent, OWL 
(and FOL, etc.) is self-documenting. (Some of my colleagues begin 
software projects by first constructing an ontology, which they then 
treat as the standard documentation of the project code.) Most OWL 
ontologies do not have 'standard documentation', and diagrams seems 
to me to be almost completely pointless at this stage. What would a 
diagram of a person be? Listing relevant facts and topic areas, and 
first application areas, might be well worth trying, however.

>. Agreement on 'the facts' expressed informally is where
>ontology engineering starts,
>
>
>so, shall we start? (before worrying where it ends)

Are there any facts about people that any of us are likely to *not* agree on?

>also, did nt you say that somethin in Higgins is broken, maybe
>that's something that should be worked on before thinking of coding

It was the coding that was 'broken', but maybe 'highly idiosyncratic' 
would be a better description. Most of the oddity of HOWL seems to 
arise from the fact that they took it upon themselves to solve a 
major architectural issue (how to create a consistent framework which 
allows multiple views of the same vocabulary) before getting down to 
the actual ontologizing. This is a bit like buying an automobile to 
get to Chicago but then deciding to re-engineer it to run on hydrogen 
before setting out. A noble idea, but not really practical at this 
stage.

Pat

>
>
>Paola


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