Tim --
Thanks for your quick reply to my reply (:-), below.
Yes, extra "upper" information may be needed. You could
represent that extra information in another ontology in a technical
notation, or you could represent it as rules in English.
In the latter case, you can get English explanations of the reasoning
used to unite the lower ontologies.
That reasoning gets complex even on simple "demo" examples, so
you may need the trust supplied by representing the extra information in
executable English.
To put it another way, a small change in that extra "upper"
information could have huge consequences, since it is pivotal to how the
lower level information is used.
Cheers, -- Adrian
PS : There's a relevant discussion about "Telephone Game /
Signal Loss" currently in full swing over on the dm-discuss
list.
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Adrian Walker
Reengineering
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At 01:14 PM 4/7/2006 +0100, you wrote:
Adrian,
thank you for your reply, but the examples you suggest do not apply to this case. The first is an example of identical semantics being represented in different ways. The second is concerned with reasoning within a single ontology.
The point about the example I suggested is that there is no way of mapping the ontologies to each other directly via rules. The only way they can be related is through an Upper Level ontology which introduces new concepts (divorce, death, ceremonies etc) which are not part of the original ontologies at all. Presented with instances in ontology 1 in my example it is impossible to say how they should be placed in ontology 2 because the necessary information simply isn t there.
OK, no more from me now!
Tim.