Just read an interesting article: Refactoring the Law: Reformulating Legal Ontologies, by Garret Wilson, which was quite interesting. Wilson, presumably a nerd turned lawyer or vice versa, makes the case that the understanding and practice of law have been evolving in that style of punctuated equilibrium that those of us in software development call “refactoring.”  That is the law too, creates categories, accretes  case law onto those categories until the number of special cases and exceptions overwhelm things at which time the pile gets turned again and we have a new way of thinking about law. He leads off with an example of how in the 1850’s courts had developed case law around liability and what was considered to be “inherently dangerous” items.  By the turn of hte 1900’s the court had categorized as “dangerous in themselves” a loaded gun, mislabeled poison, defective hair wash and “not dangerous” as a defective carriage or a defective boiler.  In MacPherson v. Buick the court finally had to decide whether a horseless carriage was morelike a locomotive (dangerous) or carraige (not dangerous) and the whole categorization scheme got reshuffled. He goes on in a wide ranging set of analogies tracing back to the greek and roman models of law and forming parallels with procedural, object oriented and agile software development methodologies. Fun read and educational.

Nearly 100 people in the international ontology community met this past April 18-19 at the sixth annual Ontology Summit to discuss “making the case for ontology.” In recent years the number of deployed ontologies has increased dramatically, yet the technology is still very niche and poorly understood outside of the community. The goal of this year’s summit was to assist technology evangelists in communicating the message by providing concrete application examples, success/value metrics and advocacy strategies. The key output is a communique and corresponding talk. The main messages are: 1) ontology is about clarifying meaning and supporting inference; 2) key value propositions are shared understanding, reduced complexity, flexibility and interoperability; and 3) ontology is ready for prime time. Go forth and ontologize. Mike Uschold

There was an article in this month’s Harvard Business Review “What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women” “> The methodology of the study was they measured IQs of individuals and then sometimes randomly and sometimes not so randomly assigned them to groups and then had the groups attempt to complete a task, which was meant to challenge the collective wisdom of the group. In most cases, as they added more women to a group the groups collective intelligence went up. Correlation of women to group performance

Todd Schneider and Ali Hashemi came up with this in the Ontology Forum email today:

Every person, organization or system has an ontology – the things presumed to exist in the world and how they behave. Interactions with the world are based on these internal ontologies. Indeed, these ontologies pervade and underpin our deliberations, inform our decisions and guide our actions. In large socio-technical systems, such as companies or organizations, each person, each technological artefact and system carries with it a view of the world relevant to its responsibilities in this context. Operations and interactions in such environments entails reconciling and streamlining these multiple sometimes conflicting and often tacit ontologies. Growing complexity and a need for smarter use of resources and solutions that cut across silos, means that it has become ever important to make explicit these implicit ontologies thereby easing interoperability and improving operational effectiveness. Concurrently, advances in computing, networking technologies and the Internet means that it is possible to effectively use ontologies to address the increasing array of socio-technical problems. Moreover, in recent years, we have witnessed the increased maturation and transition of ontology from academia to industry and government. The time is ripe to know what you know and share it with others.

I’m really digging this. We’re all bumbling along with our own internal mental models, and until we accidentally discover a misalignment we’re contented. And because computer applications also have internal (and often not well documented) mental models, we occasionally bump up against them. And ontologies are really just a forcing function. A way of making you be clear about the distinctions you make in a way that others will have difficulty glossing over.

Reid Hoffman, of LinkedIn, came up with this tag line in a video I watched where he talked about Web 3.0. While it was a very Web 2.0 view of Web 3.0, that phrase “the data is the platform” really resonated. I actually do think this is the future. The problem we have is the same one Tom Waits complained about in Nighthawks at the Dinner “My veal cutlet come down, tried to beat the shit out of my cup of coffee. Coffee just wasn’t strong enough to defend itself.” I’m afraid at the moment our data isn’t strong enough to defend itself. Seem we need something less than the straight jacket of an application and more than data laid open sitting on the disk.

As a few of you know, in our ontology building class we use an example of building an ontology that can determine which flights are international (from a US perspective). We use this example at least in part to show how solving the generalized problem (international flights from any counties perspective) requires unbound variables, and therefore rules. But one of our students suggested this “USA” centric thing was just a point of view (which it is). This reminded us of some work we’d done some time ago on “the Integral Aperspectival” which is a Ken Wilbur term for a world view that both recognized that everyone has their own point of view or perspective, and at the same time attempt to see the world as if you could integrate all those points of view. We invoked Ken Wilbur as a way of explaining how, for instance in a multi-company organization, the only real difference between accounts payable and accounts receivable is which company you logged in under. There really aren’t two applications there is one with two points of view. As you study this you realize that many of our systems have this built in “us” centric view to their apps. And so, we rebuilt the International Flight exercise in a neat way. We created a generic definition of what it means to be domestic or foreign, and then you identify what country (or region) you are at commit time, and everything resolves.

I just got back from another trip to DC, and I’m struck by two things:

1. Everyone (well the males over the drinking age anyway) wear ties. I may have to recycle my tie collection if I’m to spend much more time there — luckily there is a very low bar for fashion and taste.
2. Everyone (ok I travel in some pretty narrow circles) is talking about semantics. It’s kind of mind bottling (as Derek Zoolander would say). I was delighted to hear several presentations each slipping in references to semantics and no one gufawwing, or asking “what’s that?” it seems to have bizarrely gone mainstream without more than a small percentage of the people invoking it knowing, very specifically, what they were talking about. Sounds good to me.

How Can You Use an Enterprise Ontology?

Dave McComb presented three brief case studies on the use of Enterprise Ontologies. These Enterprise Ontologies were presented at Sallie Mae, Procter and Gamble and LexisNexis at the OntologForum.

Click here to view the case studies.

A flat tree stump or rock at a convenient height can be used as a chair, but we would not usually call it a chair until someone sits on it. Something designed to be sat on (e.g. a kitchen chair) will always be thought of as a chair even when empty. What would you call a tree stump that was purposefully cut for sitting? A “pro se attorney” is someone who defends herself in a case, but we usually never call them an attorney otherwise. A person with a law degree and a bar id is normally thought of as an attorney even if they are not yet or no longer practicing. What if an attorney retires early in her career and becomes an opera singer for 35 years until retiring. Would you think of her as an attorney? Would she? Just about anything that is of appropriate size and weight can be used as a door stop (e.g. a trash can, a person). But we would never usually call them door stops. What about a typical purpose-built rubber door stop that was retired from its doorstop duties and spent a few decades being in an abstract sculpture? As long as its shape is still obvious, would you call it a door stop?. So how can we tell if something really is a chair, an attorney or a door stop? These things are all roles. Something can be acting in the role of a chair, attorney or doorstop without otherwise being named or thought of as such. On the other hand, if something is specifically designed or qualified for a particular role, it usually will be thought of and named as that role even when not playing it. When is the last time you actualized your potential for being a door stop?

Guest blog by Michael Uschold.