May 6, 2004

Casual Ontology Development

Members of the Mindswap Project have posted Lifecycle of a Casual Web Ontology Development Process for presentation at the WWW2004 WE-SW Workshop.

The paper begins with an interesting description of a short-hand version of OWL which is designed for rapid entry and clarity.

We limit expressivity (i.e. no support for nested restrictions etc) to maintain readability, yet provide sufficient building blocks to construct a basic ontology model quickly, that can be refined later using a more powerful ontology editing tool. A more formal approach to our shorthand notation is being developed at the side. Source.

Lifecycle then describes a design scenario in which Mindswap's SWOOPed toolkit is used to search for and import terms related to the ontology under construction.

Having found related concepts/properties that the user could potentially use in the ontology being created, the editor interface must provide the user with the ability to either link to the data directly (with or without importing the entire external ontology) or borrow a specific subset of it (using a copy-paste mechanism). Source.

March 23, 2004

Fuzzy Thinking

Mohamed Khedr has taken a first pass at OntoFuzzy, an ontology for uncertain situations (via SchemaWeb).

An ontology that describes fuzzy concepts such as linguistic terms, membership functions, fuzzy rules and more. Its intended use is for describing uncertain situations and vague information. Source

RELATIONSHIP: Two Worldviews

Clay Shirky has posted a very interesting clarification of his earlier comments about the RELATIONSHIP schema.

Human social calculations are in particular a kind of thing that cannot be made formal or explicit without changing them so fundamentally that the model no longer points to the things it is modeled on...

The flaw in RELATIONSHIP is not that you can?t characterize someone as a colleague and an employee, but rather that you can?t completely specify the fullness of any reasonably complex relationship, you can?t know in advance which of those characterizations you would use in what circumstances, and you can?t make even a subset of those things explicit without changing the thing you are trying to describe. Source

I completely agree with Clay's comment about the importance of circumstance. I have been working on the issue of circumstance in developing a framework for customized social networks. There needs to be a means to contextualize the relationship: friends, co-workers, co-students, acquaintences, strangers (one-way), family members, participants in a common activity, and so on. There may also be more than one context: family members who are also co-workers.

Providing a relationship contexts would place restrictions on the nature of the relationships that could occur between two personae, which would also provide a higher level of expressiveness for users. Further, I believe that working circumstance into a social networking standard would also simplify the development of a means to fetch and query the distributed data.