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.

Role, the overloaded workhorse of the modeling world If you are a data modeler or an ontologist, sooner or later you come across “role” and it becomes the “go to” pattern for most of your design problems. I know, I’ve been there. With a “role” in your hand, everything looks like a … well, whatever it is you’d hit with a role. But after a while, especially as you climb up out of structural modeling into semantic modeling, you begin to see that there are three distinct type of roles that aren’t even variations of each other. In fact, they are disjoint at the semantic level. Semantically, you have to be careful what kind of role you’re invoking, whereas at the structural level you can be pretty cavalier. Most problems just go away when you put a role in them. (We even got to treating service locations as roles of buildings, which I actually think is correct, but could still fall prey to the problem I’m about to describe.) Here’s the problem: when we say “role” we mean one of three pretty distinct things. As it turns out, you can often implement them in the same structure, which will cause you to lose sight of the fact that they are actually different. The three disjoint meanings of role are:

• a subtype of the actor involved in the role (and therefore is really an aspect of the actor);
• a long-term relationship between the actor and an organization or perhaps an agreement (and therefore really a reified relationship);
• a property (and therefore is … a property).

What’s interesting (to me anyway — I’m getting to be kind of a modeling geek) is that in almost every situation I’ve looked at all three concepts exist, but in some situations it seems more normal to call one or the other the “role” and call the others something else. But that should be a clue as to the non universality of the “role” concept. By the way, structuralists tend to go to the middle meaning. So if that happens to be the more normal manifestation of role in a particular context, it will look like it worked. The further the norms get from that middle position, role as a reified relation looks less tenable. Let’s drill in a bit deeper with some examples. Let’s say we’re talking about “attorney.” Sounds like a role. But in most contexts we’re talking about the person who “is” an attorney. (or a doctor). For the most part, the attributes of the attorney are the attributes of the person. If we terminate the attorney, the person dies. Compare this with terminating the employee.

They merely lose their job. What is subtly going on here is that, in each case, there is what we would call a long-duration temporal relation. In the case of the employee, it is their employment contract with their employer. In the case of the attorney, it is their admission to the bar. But when we talk about the employee we often are talking about their employment contract. (That’s where their salary, tenure, even things like whether or not they are “exempt” – we might talk about whether employees are “exempt,”, e.g., from overtime laws but what we really mean is: is this relationship exempt, because a given employee could have multiple jobs, some of which are exempt and some aren’t.) With lawyers, however, the relationship to the Bar is very tangential. (By the way, that is even more so with doctors; as a lay person I was surprised when I found out that fewer than half of all practicing doctors are board-certified. I thought it was sort of like being admitted to the bar, but it isn’t.) Now let’s switch to the property aspect for a second. Sometimes, what puts you in a role is the presence of a property relationship. In fact the semantic community considers “role” to be a synonym for property, which seems way over the line to me. But let’s do a for instance. If you occupy a seat in a commercial airline, that is enough to make you a “passenger.” Congratulations. This is little more than steerage, or even cargo.

Your existence on the manifest is sufficient for you to be in the “role” of passenger. But this is far less than and different from either the subtype of the person or the long-term relationship we discussed earlier. Sometimes it’s the cardinality that gives it away. If you were on six planes you would be six passengers. That is, you would hold the role six times. If you had a frequent flyer account with the airline that flew three of those flights, you would have one role with them, and three others with the others (even if it were the same airline). I verified this with someone who did a lot of modeling with airlines: they consider their frequent flyers to be “customers” and everyone else are “passengers.”  That makes some sense; they set up a long-term durable temporal relation with their frequent flyers and keep track of their segments and miles flown, and occasionally give them free pretzels or Direct TV. So hopefully I’ve disamibiguated these three types of roles (although if it’s not clear, you can blame me for a lousy explanation, which is possible, or acknowledge that this is a very tough thing to disambiguate, or think I’m spiltting hairs unnecessarily).

You can certainly think the latter, but the last ten years of my semantic design experience tell me these are not arbitrary hairs being split here; this is exactly where designs get confused and conflated. Back to my job of trying to clarify the distinctions. Let’s drill in on some more examples. When we say “employee” is a role, most of the time we mean the second of my three roles: we’re talking about their relationship to a particular employer. But when we try to figure out who is “employed,” that isn’t what we’re talking about. We’re talking about subtypes of people, some of whom have at least one employment relationship and some of whom don’t. (To make matters more complicated, this is usually out of a sub population of people who aren’t yet too discouraged to look for work). It becomes more obvious that we’re talking about something different when you consider: what if 90% of the people who were not discouraged each had two jobs. Would we say we had 180% employment (or -80% unemployment if you like), or would we say we’re not counting roles₂anymore we’re counting roles₁ which is the subset of people who we call “employed” because they have at least one reified relationship to an employer. Having followed this train of thought, the net result for me has been two things:

1)      I now recognize that the term “role” is so overloaded that I try to avoid using it. (It doesn’t occur in gist for this reason.)

2)      I find that, in almost any design I approach, all three aspects are present. Each has a name (for attorneys, what would normally be called their role relationship to the Bar is called an “admission,” of which they could have many for as many States as they are admitted) but often people think of one of them as “the” role. That’s about all the time I can allocate in my role as a pedant — I need to get back to my role as a parent/husband/employee or whatever it is I am when I’m not writing these articles.

Michael Uschold was in the Fort for the last couple of days, and it sparked some interesting discussion on organizations in gist. In short we think we can now distinguish the broad range of types of organizations we want to cover (we want to include some non traditional “organizations” such as juries, and organizations that are spontaneously created via contract) with six properties that manifest differently for each type of organization:

• ownable — some organizations (Corporations for instance) can be owned, others (marriages, juries etc) cannot
• capacity to act (including contract) — is the organization recognized in a way that they can enter into contract, or other can they act (perform) autonomously
• purpose — the purpose of an organization (profit, charity, common defense) is the main distinguisher of many major types of organizations
• haveMembers — some organizations are defined by their members, some have limitations on number of members (Sole Proprietorships can only have individuals members)
• createdVia — what gave rise to, and/or legitimized the organization (a government, a contract etc)
• partOf — does this organization have independent existence or is it partOf another Organization (a department)

I wanted to jot this down because it’s likely a couple of weeks before I have any time to get back into gist and make these changes, but we thought this had some pretty interesting insights.