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> 3) Your thoughts on the Complexity of the current ontology expression
> languages like OWL, DAML+OIL etc.
Actually, in the MISMO (Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance
Organization, which is the agreed upon standards body in the United
States for Mortgage Technology) working groups this has been coming up
quite a bit. In its standards process MISMO maintains a data dictionary
of terms that work across the industry, as well as a variety of
structures (grouped in process areas and transactions) where these terms
are used.
It seems like a perfect candidate for a top down approach of semantic
description, possibly via OWL. To be honest on a macro level the problem
seems tenable-- much like the examples floating around the web of the
Wineries and wines, it seems like it would be pretty simple to develop a
strategy for describing the data-points, and ultimately the way in which
they can/should be used (even on a process/transaction basis). Maybe
that is because I mentally skipped some things that were important to
understand...
But as Michael said, there is a lot of resistance to terminology--
ontology, description logics, KR, etc.-- and we don't have enough
experts from that domain (i.e., I am not an expert in that domain).
There is also an ingrained need for ROI. Unfortunately, predicting ROI
in this space is difficult because of a lack of visible successes. It
would help if the media stopped focusing on what-if and started focusing
on what-happened.
But ultimately it strikes me that the solution is somewhere in between
the top-down and bottom-up approach. It would be really great if
industry organizations such as MISMO created ontologies for their space
and people could interact with them using their own local definitions
and mapping them together using equivalence classes. Especially in the
mortgage industry, if interfacing with a business partner was simply a
matter of identifying like terms, and structure was invisible, then I
think we will have made incredible progress. If you can eliminate the
need for a programmer who understands the esoteric terms of the industry
and enable the business experts to identify terms you will greatly
reduce the time and money spent interfacing.
Perhaps this is a limited or wrong view of the Semantic Web. But it is a
small step.
All the best,
Jeff Rafter
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