The slides for my Business Rules Forum presentation on event semantics and focusing on events in order to simplify process definition and to facilitate more robust governance and compliance are at Event-centric BPM. After the talk I spoke with Jan Verbeek and Gartjan Grijzen of Be Informed and reviewed their software, which is excellent. They [...]
Posts under ‘Ontology’
Simple problems with the semantic web
The standard for defining ontologies these days is OWL and Protege. Unfortunately, OWL lacks any notion of exceptions in inheritance or any other notion of defeasibility. So, although you may want to say that birds fly, you’re ontology will be broken (or become much more complicated) when you realize there are birds that can’t fly, [...]
Tendencies and purpose matter
The basic formal ontology (BFO) offers a simple, elegant process model. It adds alethic and teleological semantics to the more procedural models, among which I would include NIST’s process specification language (PSL) along with BPMN. Although alethic typically refers to necessary vs. possible, it clearly subsumes the probable or expected (albeit excluding deontics0). For example, [...]
Google follows Microsoft’s lead towards intelligence
Being a fan of increased intelligence on the web, including Bing’s use of Powerset and True Knowledge, I enjoyed cnet’s report, “Google search gets answer highlights and events.” Google now shows the following “The Empire State Building rises to 1250 ft (381 m) at the 102nd floor” in response to the classic semantic web test question. [...]
Time for the next generation of knowledge automation
In preparing for my workshop at the Business Rules Forum in Las Vegas on November 5th, I have focused on the following needs in reasoning about processes, about events, and about or over time: Reasoning at a point within a [business] process Reasoning about events that occur over time. Reasoning about a [business] process (as [...]
Sir Tim Berners-Lee on Ontology
A panel on whether or not ontology is needed to achieve a collective vision for the semantic web was held on Tuesday at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009) near Washington, DC. For most of the panelists the question was rhetorical. But there were a few interesting points made, including that machine learning of [...]
Zigtag for social semantic tagging
I started to use Radar Networks’ Twine at the invitation of CEO Nova Spivak after writing this earlier this year (also see this). I enjoyed it for a while, especially because a lot of technology folks were hooking up with each other, especially the semantic web community, on Twine. But I found it tedious to [...]
A Common Upper Ontology for Advanced Placement tests
I have previously written about the lack of a common upper ontology in the semantic web and commercial software markets (e.g., business rules). For example, the lack of understanding of time limits the intelligence and ease of use of software in business process management (BPM) and complex event processing (CEP). The lack of understanding of [...]