Center for Commercial Ontology

Prospectus

David R. Koepsell

Bowstreet.com, Inc.

Businessweb.com Ontologist

Adjunct Associate Professor, SUNY at Buffalo

In 1998, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the concept of hypertext and intellectual grand-daddy of the World Wide Web, coined the term "semantic web" to describe the natural evolution and next stage of the Internet. In sum, the Web has been a medium that uses HTML to display information, but which does not structure it in a way useful and understandable by machines. XML promises to bridge this gap and to transfer the web from a realm of pure syntax to one of semantics, where meaning is inherent in the data presented.

XML schemas have begun to spring up describing domains of objects in various industries and offering tools that allows better interchange of meaning via the Web. But the promise of XML cannot be realized fully without some overarching ontology, or the structuring of data according to systematically logical principles across all industries, not simply in independent verticals. A universal ontology has long been a dream of ontologists, who have recently become Balkanized in various niches crafting domain-specific ontologies. A universal ontology, bringing together these distinct domains, will be the foundation upon which the semantic web may finally be realized, and will break the dams which prevent the promised flood of commerce on the web.

The Center for Commercial Ontology will be a clearinghouse for information relating to the commercial applications of Ontology, and serve as an incubator for further research by ontologists both from within and outside of the business community resulting in practical applications of ontology.

The Center for Commercial Ontology will:

• Operate out of various academic institutions including SUNY at Buffalo with close relationships among member institutions University of New Hampshire, Dartmouth-Tuck, MIT and Harvard departments of Philosophy, Linguistics, Library Science and their various business schools.
• Coordinate lectures, courses and colloquia in applied ontology among these institutions, as well as internships with high-tech firms and working ontologists.

• Bring together academics from linguistics, philosophy, AI, and business schools, all of whom are researching Ontology and its applications.
• Coordinate the future development of the semantic web among the efforts in academia and those in the business world.
• Be a convergence point for the various schools and applications of ontology, whether through enterprise modeling, the creation of XML schemas, the categorizing of large portal sites such as the Open Directory or Yahoo! or wherever else ontology is serving to lubricate the wheels of business.
• Promote awareness of the role and methods of ontology in commerce.
• Sponsor fellowships in Commecial Ontology at participating universities.

Member Institutions will host conferences, offer courses, participate in colloquia, bring in visiting lecturers affiliated with the Center and hold summer institutes and other training in practical ontology. Each will be a part and host for the Center for Commercial Ontology and fellowships will be awarded at each institution to graduate and business school students working toward a commercial ontology-related curriculum or major.

Sponsors will each have a fellowship named after them at a member institution, e.g, "The ACME fellowship in Commercial Ontology at University X." Sponsors will also be able to call upon the Center’s consulting resources at substantially reduced or negligible rates depending upon the level of sponsorship, and for a certain number of billable hours. Sponsors will also hold review and veto over consulting activities of the Center to the extent that they might compete directly with a sponsor’s interests. Sponsors will play an active and guiding role in any standards initiatives for implementing commercial ontologies.

The Center will employ an Executive Director and a small staff who will coordinate various public projects in the ontology community, including conferences, publications and consortia. The Center will also offer paid consulting services which will eventually generate sustainable operating revenue. Consultants affiliated with the Center will come from appropriate backgrounds, with publications or experience in either academic or practical ontology. Consultants will bill hours for their consulting, presuming no conflicts of interest exist as determined by the Board of Directors and the various sponsors. Consultants affiliated with the Center will be paid directly for their services and be expected to return a portion to the Center for continued affiliation.

The Center will be affiliated with major institutions noted for their research and intellectual leadership in the field of applied ontology, notably, the State University of New York at Buffalo, which has been a major research center in the field and the University of New Hampshire, Dartmouth-Tuck, MIT and Harvard.

Business value:

By promoting partnerships and communication among theorists, businesspeople, and ontologists working in the field, the study and practice of ontology will be guided in a way which best advances the practical aims of working ontologists. Businesses working to devlop their niche in the semantic web will better be able to communicate their needs and understand the value of various practices and schools of ontology. The commercial application of ontology will be merged with the theoretical pursuits of academic ontologists and a virtuous circle of value will develop among these components.

Ontology is the very first science. Ontology involves discovering categories and fitting objects into them in ways that make sense. When Aristotle looked around the ancient world, he saw that there was value in beginning to categorize its parts. He divided the world according to its constituent elements and processes, from the first attempts at speciation of animals and plants, to The Physics and The Metaphysics. Since Aristotle, this task has become divided among the various discrete sciences. Most scientists don’t think of what they do as ontology, but in many ways, it is exactly what Aristotle began over two thousand years ago. This work goes on not just in the "hard" sciences, but in social science as well. It is also something each of us does, every day.

When we make a list of things to do, or of records and books we most want to buy, or videos we intend to rent, we are categorizing – we are engaging in rudimentary ontology. By prioritizing items in a list, we are assigning relationships among various things. Ontology can be relatively simple, or it can be quite complex.

Ontology becomes more complex, and even daunting, when we begin to grapple with large domains of objects with complex relationships among them. For instance, anyone who has attempted to outline the processes and components of even a relatively small enterprise, has experienced the brain-cramps that can come with complex ontology. Nonetheless, enterprise modeling has been a valuable tool in the realm of Business Process Reengineering. It can be done. Snapshots of an entire enterprise can be made at a point in time. Decisions can be made about the future structure of an organization based upon the ontologies revealed through this exercise.

Business webs are composed of dynamically lioked, XML web services. Business webs are ontological objects. A business web is composed of all of the various parts and relations of a complex enterprise, including its various partnerships, enabled in XML. A business web is dynamic, and its topology is constantly changing. Having a constantly updated, dynamic picture of an enterprise can be realized through the transformation of an enterprise into a business web. A necessary first step, however, is categorizing the various discrete parts of an enterprise in a way which is readily understandable and which will allow line-of-businesspeople to understand the powerful snapshot a business web affords.

Categorizing the parts of the business world can be approached through any number of ways. Any attempt to do so must keep the number of possible top-level categories to a minimum, and make the top-level break down easy to use and understand. One way to approach this task is to ask, what are the generic human processes that encompass any and all business processes or actions? The methods we choose to develop such ontologies matter. Without coordination, hundreds of various ontologies may develop, and a thousand schools of thought may contend, but the greatest value of such an ontology may be unrealized. If an ontology is to bridge numerous individual categorizations, coordination by some group is necessary.

Clearly, beginning the task of constructing an ontology of business processes requires some clear methodology and concern for the practical outcomes of decisions about starting points and methodologies. It cannot be done efficiently in an intellectual vacuum, or in an ad hoc manner.

The usefulness of an ontology depends upon the ability of people to comprehend the categorical scheme, and to browse and find objects in that scheme as well as determine where new objects will likely fall in it. Designing a useful ontology is much more difficult than designing an accurate one. As an analogy, a private language can be constructed with perfect accuracy, using strictly adhered-to rules, and remaining at all times internally consistent. However, that private language, no matter how accurate, is only useful to those sharing that language. If the members of that group die out, then the language becomes useless.

Studies about the usefulness of an ontology are critical to deployment, yet can be overlooked in a purely theoretical approach to constructing an "ideal" ontology. This is the nexus point between the business world and the purely academic.

As discussed above, ontologists come from a variety of backgrounds. Moreover, many people practice ontology without realizing they are doing so. Some ways of developing ontologies are better than others. Repeatable, efficient ways of creating ontologies should be preferred over one-off, inefficient methodologies. Some ontologies are more useful than others. The criteria for useful ontologies, and the methodologies used to create them, are valuable resources for ongoing work in constructing and using commercial ontologies. Having a Center whose focus is to bring together these divergent views and backgrounds will help enable the development of reusable, efficient, and workable methodologies, and can coordinate the development and deployment of working commercial ontologies

James Moor (Dartmouth)

Andrew Frank (Director, Institute of Geoinformation and Geodetic Engineering, Vienna Technical University, Austria)

Wolfgang Grassl (Professor of Management, University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica)

Jan C. Joerden (Professor of Law, Europa University, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany)

Harlan Onsrud (Chair of the Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering, University of Maine)

Stanley L. Paulson (Professor, School of Law, Washington University, St. Louis)

Achille Varzi (Philosophy, Columbia University

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