Comments on: Understanding events and processes takes time http://haleyai.com/wordpress/2008/02/19/understanding-events-and-processes-takes-time/ systems that know and understand and think and learn Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:01:08 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.1 By: paul@haleyAI.com http://haleyai.com/wordpress/2008/02/19/understanding-events-and-processes-takes-time/#comment-19 paul@haleyAI.com Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:24:55 +0000 http://haleyai.com/wordpress/2008/02/19/understanding-events-and-processes-takes-time/#comment-19 Yours is a good and related question! When we model ACORD and MISMO we try to abstract from the data level specifications to the domain semantics and ontology, of course. XSD can make this difficult. For example, ACORD aggregates information in ways that are technical but not semantic. In MISMO, there are some interesting data type challenges (I think it had something to do with money of various currencies). Although the technical hurdles have to be overcome, for the most part, at least in the ontology, they can be ignored. The key things are understanding the domain-independent semantics really well. For example, ACORD and MISMO share a notion of property (including real estate and buildings). This property has addresses. Addresses refer to places, generally along roads in municipalities or counties, in states (or provinces or territories), in countries. This should be a well-defined ontology that has nothing to do with either ACORD or MISMO, of course. If you have that, and one for cars, you have a lot of ACORD covered. You still have to map the domain-independent aspects to the XSD and augment the ontology with what is specific to the domain, and that takes careful thinking and patience, but once you do you have separated all the knowledge that you will capture using that ontology from the XML implementation. The result is a great deal of flexibility, reuse and capability, all of which decrease cycle times dramatically, but only if you move away from the implementation into a semantically adequate ontology (supported by a good logic capability, for which I prefer natural language, as you may know.) Yours is a good and related question! When we model ACORD and MISMO we try to abstract from the data level specifications to the domain semantics and ontology, of course. XSD can make this difficult. For example, ACORD aggregates information in ways that are technical but not semantic. In MISMO, there are some interesting data type challenges (I think it had something to do with money of various currencies). Although the technical hurdles have to be overcome, for the most part, at least in the ontology, they can be ignored. The key things are understanding the domain-independent semantics really well. For example, ACORD and MISMO share a notion of property (including real estate and buildings). This property has addresses. Addresses refer to places, generally along roads in municipalities or counties, in states (or provinces or territories), in countries. This should be a well-defined ontology that has nothing to do with either ACORD or MISMO, of course. If you have that, and one for cars, you have a lot of ACORD covered. You still have to map the domain-independent aspects to the XSD and augment the ontology with what is specific to the domain, and that takes careful thinking and patience, but once you do you have separated all the knowledge that you will capture using that ontology from the XML implementation. The result is a great deal of flexibility, reuse and capability, all of which decrease cycle times dramatically, but only if you move away from the implementation into a semantically adequate ontology (supported by a good logic capability, for which I prefer natural language, as you may know.)

]]> By: snshor http://haleyai.com/wordpress/2008/02/19/understanding-events-and-processes-takes-time/#comment-18 snshor Wed, 20 Feb 2008 02:56:05 +0000 http://haleyai.com/wordpress/2008/02/19/understanding-events-and-processes-takes-time/#comment-18 Paul, not 100% related question, but could you share your thoughts and experience on integrating ACORD and MISMO from ontology perspective? What do you think about quality and consistency of "industry standards" and about complexity, quality and usability of the resulting ontology? Your post clearly demostrates that even a small and industry-neutral "calendar domain" can be fairly complex, how to manage such a complexity in a more complex industry-specific ontologies? Paul,

not 100% related question, but could you share your thoughts and experience on integrating ACORD and MISMO from ontology perspective? What do you think about quality and consistency of “industry standards” and about complexity, quality and usability of the resulting ontology? Your post clearly demostrates that even a small and industry-neutral “calendar domain” can be fairly complex, how to manage such a complexity in a more complex industry-specific ontologies?

]]>