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Showing posts with label upper ontologies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label upper ontologies. Show all posts

Monday, June 8, 2009

PriceWaterhouseCoopers Spring Technology Forecast (Part 3)

This is the last in a series of posts summarizing the PriceWaterhouseCooper Spring Technology Forecast. I spent a lot of time on the report, since it highlights many important concepts about the Semantic Web and business.

The last featured article in the report is entitled 'A CIO's strategy for rethinking "messy BI"'. The recommendation is to use Linked Data to bring together internal and external information - to help with the "information problem". How does PwC define the "information problem"? As follows ... "there's no way traditional information systems can handle all the sources [of data], many of which are structured differently or not structured at all." The recommendation boils down to creating a shared or upper ontology for information mediation, and then using it for analysis, for helping to create a business ecosystem, and to harmonize business logic and operating models. The two figures below illustrate these concepts.





The article includes a great quote on the information problem, why today's approaches (even metadata) are not enough, and the uses of Semantic Web technologies ... "Think of Linked Data as a type of database join that relies on contextual rules and pattern matching, not strict preset matches. As a user looks to mash up information from varied sources, Linked Data tools identify the semantics and ontologies to help the user fit the pieces together in the context of the exploration. ... Many organizations already recognize the importance of standards for metadata. What many don’t understand is that working to standardize metadata without an ontology is like teaching children to read without a dictionary. Using ontologies to organize the semantic rationalization of the data that flow between business partners is a process improvement over electronic data interchange (EDI) rationalization because it focuses on concepts and metadata, not individual data elements, such as columns in a relational database management system. The ontological approach also keeps the CIO’s office from being dragged into business-unit technical details and squabbling about terms. And linking your ontology to a business partner’s ontology exposes the context semantics that data definitions lack."

PwC suggests taking 2 (non-exclusive) approaches to "explore" the Semantic Web and Linked Data:

  • Add the dimension of semantics and ontologies to existing, internal data warehouses and data stores
  • Provide tools to help users get at both internal and external Linked Data
And, as with the previous posts, I want to finish with a quote from one of the interviews in the report. This quote comes from Frank Chum of Chevron, and discusses why they are now looking to the Semantic Web and ontologies to advance their business. "Four things are going on here. First, the Semantic Web lets you be more expressive in the business logic, to add more contextual meaning. Second, it lets you be more flexible, so that you don’t have to have everything fully specified before you start building. Then, third, it allows you to do inferencing, so that you can perform discovery on the basis of rules and axioms. Fourth, it improves the interoperability of systems, which allows you to share across the spectrum of the business ecosystem. With all of these, the Semantic Web becomes a very significant piece of technology so that we can probably solve some of the problems we couldn’t solve before. One could consider these enhanced capabilities [from Semantic Web technology] as a “souped up” BI [business intelligence]."

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

"Top Down" or "Bottom Up" Ontologies

I received the following question from a colleague of mine... He asked about the benefits and risks of using a single standardized ontology (a “top down” approach) versus using local, private, or community ontologies (“bottom up”). Unfortunately, the benefits of one are the risks of the other! A single standardized ontology admits no errors of translation or omission. However, consensus ranges from difficult to impossible to obtain, and usually many concessions have to be made during its definition. Local or community ontologies are natural, and admit no frustrations or human errors due to learning new representations, or due to using concepts that have little semantic meaning in a community. However, you typically have lots of community ontologies and need to interoperate between them.

What is a possible answer? Take the local, private and community ontologies of your business and map them "up" to an existing "standardized ontology" - such as exists in medicine or even construction - see, for example, ISO 15926. (I already discussed the possibilities of ontology alignment provided by the Semantic Web in earlier posts, and will provide more details over the next few weeks.)

Or, if a standard ontology does not exist, create one from the local ontologies by mapping the local ones to one or more "upper" ontologies. At this point, some people will say "ughhh" another term - "upper" ontology - what the heck is that? Upper ontologies capture very general and reusable terms and definitions. Two examples that are both interesting and useful are:
  • SUMO (http://www.ontologyportal.org), the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology - SUMO incorporates much knowledge and broad content from a variety of sources. Its downside is that it is not directly importable into the Semantic Web infrastructure, as it is written in a different syntax (something called KIF). Its upsides are its vast, general coverage, its public domain IEEE licensing, and the many domain ontologies defined to extend it.
  • Proton (http://proton.semanticweb.org/D1_8_1.pdf), PROTo ONtology - PROTON takes a totally different approach to its ontology definition. Instead of theoretical analysis and hand-creation of the ontology, PROTON was derived from a corpus of general news sources, and hence addresses modern day, political, financial and sports concepts. It is encoded in OWL (OWL-Lite to be precise) for Semantic Web use, and was defined as part of the European Union's SEKT (Semantically Enabled Knowledge Technologies) project, http://www.sekt-project.com. (I will definitely be blogging more about SEKT in future posts. There is much interesting work there!)
Now, I must be clear that I do NOT advocate pushing the standard ontology down to the local communities - unless there are only small tweaks to making the standard ontologies work there. With ontology alignment technologies, you can have the best of all worlds - a standard ontology to use when unifying and analyzing the local ontologies, but all the naturalness of the local ontologies for the communities.
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