Against Idiosynchrasy in Ontology Development by Barry Smith …and responses from Matthew West Discussion on

Barry Smith -Julian Park Distinguished Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo University at Buffalo -Research Director of the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS).Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science -Smith’s current research focus is ontology and its applications in biomedicine and biomedical informatics, where he is working on a variety of projects relating to biomedical terminologies and electronic health records.ontology Source: Matthew West If Tim Berners-Lee is the father of the internet, you could say Matthew West is the father of ISO15926 (at least Part 2) -Worked for Shell between 1978 and Much of his work has been in the development of standards for information management (particularly engineering) -Has been involved in PISTEP, POSC Caesar, EPISTLE, ISO TC184/SC4, BSI AMT/4, IEEE- SUO, KnoW and ONTOLOG Source: The “possible individuals” Background

ISO as an Upper Ontology? -Matthew West co-authored a paper in 2007 proposing ISO be put forward as an upper ontology. -From this perspective, Barry Smith argues against this idea by pointing out a number of ‘defects’ in the design of the data model, including: -Terminological confusions -Failure to adhere to sound ontology construction principles What is all the fuss about? A namespace is a class_of_arrangement_of_individual where the class_of_whole and class_of_part are members of class_of_information_representation and the part is the most significant part of the whole that is the namespace. Source: ISO Example: ISO definition for namespace

The terms comprising the taxonomy are domain independant Example terms: SingleValuedRelation (SUMO) Process (SUMO,DOLCE) Class_of_biological_matter (ISO 15926) ISO is sufficient to model multiple domains: Example domains: Information Management (Libraries, Museums) Engineering (Design, Construction) Operations and Maintenance Chemical, Medical, Physical systems… So on the surface ISO could be considered as an Upper ontology What makes an Ontology an Upper Ontology?

According to Smith, ISO breaches a number of principles (both as an ontology and an upper ontology) The principal of openness As an ISO standard, people have to pay to get hold of the specifications comprising the standard The principle of intelligible definitions E.g. A class_of_cause_of_beginning_of_class_of_individual is a class_of_relationship that indicates that a member of a class_of_activity causes the beginning of a member of a class_of_individual. The principle of non-circularity E.g. An is an that is an integer number. Barry Smith’s Principals

B.S. Response: On the issue of classes named class_of_X and class_of_class_of_X M.W. Response: The data model is a specification for the database to hold any extension to the ontology. Thus entity types are required for instances but not the X’s No useful tools available to map domain specific data to iso M.W. concedes to a couple of minor issues Explanation missing in documentation Typo’s in documentation These seem to be the only ground that M.W. concedes, however for the rest M.W. stands by his standard Response to Against Idiosyncrasy in Ontology Development

Model elements created to suit implementation rather than purpose Complicated and confusing naming for entities and types E.g. class_of_cause_of_beginning_of_class_of_individual Deals with class and metaclass at the one modelling layer Definitions written using subjective wording Use EXPRESS diagrams that are mind-bogglingly confusing E.g. class of namespace! Design of standard is heavily influenced by implementation Basing design decisions to suit implementation language i.e. OWL Why ISO is NOT an Upper Ontology According to Smith, ISO is more like a coding scheme such as the Standard Algebraic Notation for Chess…which is not an ontology of chess.