Development
Upper ontologies are also commercially valuable, creating competition to define them. Peter Murray-Rust has claimed that this leads to "semantic and ontological warfare due to competing standards", and accordingly any standard foundation ontology is likely to be contested among commercial or political parties, each with their own idea of "what exists". An important factor exacerbating the failure to arrive at a common approach has been the lack of open-source applications that would permit the testing of different ontologies in the same computational environment. The differences have been debated largely on theoretical grounds, or are merely the result of personal preferences, with no method to objectively compare practical performance.
No particular upper ontology has yet gained widespread acceptance as a de facto standard. Different organizations have attempted to define standards for specific domains. The 'Process Specification Language' (PSL) created by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) is one example.
Another important factor leading to the absence of wide adoption of any existing upper ontology is the complexity. An upper ontology typically has from 2,000 to 10,000 elements (classes, relations), with complex interactions among them. The resulting complexity is similar to that of a human natural language, and the learning process can be even longer than for a natural language because of the unfamiliar format and logical rules. The motivation to overcome this learning barrier is largely absent because of the paucity of publicly accessible examples of use. As a result, those building domain ontologies for local applications tend to create the simplest possible domain-specific ontology, not related to any upper ontology. Such domain ontologies may function adequately for the local purpose, but they are very time-consuming to relate accurately to other domain ontologies.
There has been debate over whether the concept of using a single, shared upper ontology is even feasible or practical at all. There has been further debate over whether the debates are valid – often leading to outright censorship and boosterism of particular approaches in supposedly neutral sources. Some of these arguments are outlined below.
Read more about this topic: Upper Ontology (computer Science)
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion.”
—John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902)
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
“For the child whose impulsiveness is indulged, who retains his primitive-discharge mechanisms, is not only an ill-behaved child but a child whose intellectual development is slowed down. No matter how well he is endowed intellectually, if direct action and immediate gratification are the guiding principles of his behavior, there will be less incentive to develop the higher mental processes, to reason, to employ the imagination creatively. . . .”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)