Twenty Years of Applied Ontology:!1993-2013

!

Nicola Guarino National Research Council, Institute for Cognitive Science and

Technologies (ISTC-CNR) Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA)

www.loa.istc.cnr.it

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Applied Ontology: an emerging interdisciplinary area

• Applied Ontology builds on philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics and logic with the purpose of understanding, clarifying, making explicit and communicating people's assumptions about the nature and structure of the world.!

• This orientation towards helping people understanding each other distinguishes applied ontology from philosophical ontology, and motivates its unavoidable interdisciplinary nature.

ontological analysis: study of !content (of these assumptions) as such !(independently of their representation)

Two classic KR problems solved by formal ontology

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Problem 1 - Terminological competence

rock

igneous rock sedimentary rock metamorphic rock

large rock grey rock

large grey igneous rock

grey sedimentary

rock

pet metamorphic rock

[From Brachman, R ., R. F ikes, et al. 1983. “Krypton: A Functional Approach to Knowledge Representation”, IEEE Computer]

How many rock kinds are there?

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The answer

• Brachman & Fikes 83: • It’s a dangerous question, only “safe” queries about

analytical relationships between terms should be asked • Brachman & Levesque 82:

• KR needs terminological competence • “an enhancement mode transistor (a kind of transistor)

should be understood as different from a pass transistor (a role a transistor plays in a larger circuit)”

• These issues have been simply given up while striving for logical simplification and computational tractability

• The OntoClean methodology, based on formal ontological analysis, allows us to conclude: there are 3 kinds of rocks

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Problem 2 - What’s in a link?

• Woods’ “What’s in a link?” (1975):

JOHN HEIGHT: 6 FEET KISSED: MARY !• "no longer do the link names stand for attributes of a

node, but rather arbitrary relations between the node and other nodes”

• different notations should be used

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Kinds of attributes

JOHN HEIGHT: 6 FEET RIGHT-LEG: LEG#1 MOTHER: JANE KISSED: MARY

intrinsic quality

part

role

external relation

We need different primitives to express different structuring relationships among concepts

We need to represent non-structuring relationships separately

Current description logics tend to collapse EVERYTHING!

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The formal tools of ontological analysis

• Theory of Parts (Mereology) !• Theory of Unity and Plurality!• Theory of Essence and Identity!• Theory of Dependence!• Theory of Composition and Constitution!• Theory of Properties and Qualities

The basis for a common ontology vocabulary

Idea of Chris Welty, IBM Watson Research Centre, while visiting our lab in 2000

Twenty Years of Applied Ontology:!community-building events

• 1993: 1st int. ws. on Formal Ontology & Information Systems, Padua"• 1998: 1st FOIS conference, Trento"• 2002: Ontolog forum community established, US"• 2005: Applied Ontology Journal (IOS Press) (Trento + Stanford)"• 2005: ECOR, NCOR, JCOR..."• 2006: First public discussion on an ontology association at FOIS "• 2008: Int. Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) founded"• 2011: Applied Ontology gets official ISI recognition"• 2012: First mass application of ontology engineering: SIRI"• 2012: Ontology science mentioned in State of Future report"• 2013: IJCAI invites authors of best FOIS papers"• 2013: Philosophical community (J. Lowe) organizes a conference on

applied ontology

“The fast-growing science of ontology could exert a greater impact on humanity than the rise of the Internet”

A new discipline is emerging?

Barry Smith: why I am no longer a philosopher

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A hint from the past: The emergence of psychology as a science

• 1874: Franz Brentano publishes Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint!

• 1879: Wilhelm Wundt establishes the world’s first psychological laboratory at the University of Leipzig"

• 1883: First psychology lab in America established at Johns Hopkins"• University authorities give Wundt's Leipzig laboratory formal recognition"

• 1889: First international congress of Psychology"• Alexius Meinong founds Laboratory of Psychology in University of Graz"• First Chinese translation of a Western psychology book"

• 1892: American Psycgological Association founded (42 members)"• 1894: Stumpf called to serve as professor of philosophy in Berlin with

the explicit task of establishing there an institute of psychology

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Typical reasons for founding a new discipline

• feelings of chaos, dead-endedness, triviality inside present disciplines"

• new methods for tackling problems"• empirical results"• increasing intersection with other disciplines"• increasing need for cross-disciplinary collaboration

Typical reactions to the founding of a new discipline

If one is interested in the relations between fields which, according to customary academic divisions, belong to different departments, then he will not be welcomed as a builder of bridges, as he might have expected, but will rather be regarded by both sides as an outsider and troublesome intruder." R. Carnap, "My Work in Philosophy Begins".

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What is needed to found a new discipline

journals"conferences"funding "institutes"societies"industrial applications"subject-matter"methods"cumulative results"teaching"career path (inside and outside the university)

The IAOA flagship journal: Applied OntologyEditors in chief: Nicola Guarino ISTC-CNR

Mark Musen Stanford University

""IOS Press Amsterdam, Berlin, Washington, Tokyo, Beijing

www.applied-ontology.org

Now indexed by ISI and Scopus. Impact Factor: 1.105

The Association is addressed to:

• Philosophers who have an interest in applying their analytical tools to

technology advancement; • cognitive scientists, linguists and terminologists aware of the subtle

interplays among ontology, language, and cognition; • computer scientists and IT professionals aware of the desperate need of

a sound interdisciplinary approach for building future generation socio-technical systems.

IAOA: a unique combination of key aspects

1. Interdisciplinarity"

2. Cooperation between academy, industry, and communities of practice (with an eye on education)"

3. Scientific authoritativeness"

4. Openness"

5. Legal status"

6. Transparent governance

A new discipline (or science) is emerging?

Maybe."

See the history of Psychology, Systems Engineering..."

See recent proposals for Web Science, Services Science…"

For sure, a humble, truly interdisciplinary approach is needed, focusing on letting new ideas, approaches, methodologies emerge

from the mutual cross-fertilization of different disciplines.

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