How does one do an ontological investigation?

It’s a question I’ve been asked several times. Students see ontology papers in venues such as FOIS, EKAW, KR, AAAI, Applied Ontology, or the FOUST workshops and it seems as if all that stuff just fell from the sky neatly into the paper, or that the authors perhaps played with mud and somehow got the paper’s contents to emerge neatly from it. Not quite. It’s just that none of the authors bothered to write a “methods and methodologies” or “procedure” section. That it’s not written doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

To figure out how to go about doing such an ontological investigation, there are a few options available to you:

• Read many such papers and try to distill commonalities with which one could  reverse engineer a possible process that could have led to those documented outcomes.
• Guess the processes and do something, submit the manuscript, swallow the critical reviews and act upon those suggestions; repeat this process until it makes it through the review system. Then try again with another topic to see if you can do it now by yourself in fewer iterations.
• Try to get a supervisor or a mentor who has published such papers and be their apprentice or protégé formally or informally.
• Enrol in an applied ontology course, where they should be introducing you to the mores of the field, including the process of doing ontological investigations. Or take up a major/minor in philosophy.

Pursuing all options likely will get you the best results. In a time of publish-or-perish, shortcuts may be welcome since the ever greater pressures are less forgiving to learning things the hard way.

Every discipline has its own ways for how to investigate something. At a very high level, it still will look the same: you arrive at a question, a hypothesis, or a problem that no one has answered/falsified/solved before, you do your thing and obtain results, discuss them, and conclude. For ontology, what hopefully rolls out of such an investigation is what the nature of the entity under investigation is. For instance, what dispositions are, a new insight on the transitivity of parthood, the nature of the relation between portions of stuff, or what a particular domain entity (e.g., money, peace, pandemic) means.

I haven’t seen cookbook instructions for how to go about doing this for applied ontology. I did do most of the options listed above: I read (and still read) a lot of articles, conducted a number of such investigations myself and managed to get them published, and even did a (small) dissertation in applied philosophy (mentorships are hard to come by for women in academia, let alone the next stage of being someone’s protégé). I think it is possible to distill some procedure from all of that, for applied ontology at least. While it’s still only a rough outline, it may be of interest to put it out there to get feedback on it to see whether this can be collectively refined or extended.

With X the subject of investigation, which could be anything—a feature such as the colour of objects, the nature of a relation, the roles people fulfill, causality, stuff, collectives, events, money, secrets—the following steps will get you at least closer to an answer, if not finding the answer outright:

1. (optional) Consult dictionaries and the like for what they say about X;
2. Do a scientific literature review on X and, if needed when there’s little on X, also look up attendant topics for possible ideas;
3. Criticise the related work for where they fall short and how, and narrow down the problem/question regarding X;
4. Put forth your view on the matter, by building up the argument step by step; e.g., as follows:
   1. From informal explanation to a possible intermediate stage with sketching a solution (in ad hoc notation for illustration or by abusing ORM or UML class diagram notation) to a formal characterisation of X, or the aspect of X if the scope was narrowed down.
   2. From each piece of informal explanation, create the theory one axiom or definition at a time.
   Either of the two may involve proofs for logical consequences and will have some iterations of looking up more scientific literature to finalise an axiom or definition.

5. (optional) Evaluate and implement.
6. Discuss where it gave new insight, note any shortcomings, and mention new questions it may generate or problem it doesn’t solve yet, and conclude.

For step 3, and as compared to scientific literature I’ve read in other disciplines, the ontologists are a rather blunt critical lot. The formalisation stage in step 4 is more flexible than indicated. For instance, you can choose your logic or make one up [1], but you do need at least something of that (more about that below). Few use tools, such as Isabelle, Prover9, and HeTS, to assist with the logic aspects, but I would recommend you do. Also within that grand step 4, is that philosophers typically would not use UML or ORM or the like, but use total freedom in drawing something, if there’s a drawing at all (and a good number would recoil at the very word ‘conceptual data modeling language’, but that’s for another time), and likewise for many a logician. Here are two sample sequences for that step 4:

A visualization of the ‘one definition or axiom at a time’ option (4b)

A visualization of the ‘iterating over a diagram first’ option (4a)

As an aside, the philosophical investigations are lonesome endeavours resulting in disproportionately more single-author articles and books. This is in stark contrast with ontologies, those artefacts in computing and IT: many of them are developed in teams or even in large consortia, ranging from a few modellers to hundreds of contributors. Possibly because there are more tasks and the scope often may be larger.

Is that all there is to it? Sort of, yes, but for different reasons, there may be different emphases on different components (and so it still may not get you through the publication process to tell the world about your awesome results). Different venues have different scopes, even if they use the same terminology in their respective CFPs. Venues such as KR and AAAI are very much logic oriented, so there must be a formalization and proving interesting properties will substantially increase the (very small) chance of getting the paper accepted. Toning down the philosophical musings and deliberations is unlikely to be detrimental. For instance, our paper on essential vs immutable part-whole relations [2]. I wouldn’t expect the earlier papers, such as on social roles by Masolo et al [3] or temporal mereology by Donnelly and Bittner [4], to be able to make it through in the KR/AAAI/IJCAI venues nowadays (none of the IJCAI’22 papers sound even remotely like an ontology paper). But feel free to try. IJCAI 2023 will be in Cape Town, in case that information would help to motivate trying.

Venues such as EKAW and KCAP like some theory, but there’s got to be some implementation, (plausible) use, and/or evaluation to it for it to have a chance to make it through the review process. For instance, my theory on relations was evaluated on a few ontologies [5] and the stuff paper had the ontology also in OWL, modelling guidance for use, and notes on interoperability [6]. All those topics, which reside in the “step 5” above, come at the ‘cost’ of less logic and less detailed philosophical deliberations—research time and a paper’s page limits do have hard boundaries.

Ontology papers in FOIS and the like prefer to see more emphasis on the theory and what can be dragged in and used or adapted from advances in analytic philosophy, cognitive science, and attendant disciplines. Evaluation is not asked for as a separate item but assumed to be evident from the argumentation. I admit that sometimes I skip that as well when I write for such venues, e.g., in [7], but typically do put some evaluation in there nonetheless (recall [1]). And there still tends to be the assumption that one can write axioms flawlessly and oversee consequences without the assistance of automated model checkers and provers. For instance, have a look at the FOIS 2020 best paper award paper on a theory of secrets [8], which went through the steps mentioned above with the 4b route, and the one about the ontology of competition [9], which took the 4a route with OntoUML diagrams (with the logic implied by its use), and one more on mereology that first had other diagrams as part of the domain analysis to then go to the formalization with definitions and theorems and a version in CLIF [10]. That’s not to say you shouldn’t do an evaluation of sorts (of the variety use cases, checking against requirements, proving consistency, etc.), but just that you may be able to get away with not doing so (provided your argumentation is good enough and there’s enough novelty to it).

Finally, note that this is a blog post and it was not easy to keep it short. Alleys and more explanations and illustrations and details are quite possible. If you have comments on the high-level procedure, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment on the blog or contact me directly!

References

[1] Fillottrani, P.R., Keet, C.M.. An analysis of commitments in ontology language design. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems 2020 (FOIS’20). Brodaric, B and Neuhaus, F. (Eds.). IOS Press, FAIA vol. 330, 46-60.

[2] Artale, A., Guarino, N., and Keet, C.M. Formalising temporal constraints on part-whole relations. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR’08). Gerhard Brewka, Jerome Lang (Eds.) AAAI Press, pp 673-683.

[3] Masolo, C., Vieu, L., Bottazzi, E., Catenacci, C., Ferrario, R., Gangemi, A., & Guarino, N. Social Roles and their Descriptions. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR’04). AAAI press. pp 267-277.

[4] Bittner, T., & Donnelly, M. A temporal mereology for distinguishing between integral objects and portions of stuff. Proceedings of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference 2007 (AAAI’07). AAAI press. pp 287-292.

 [5] Keet, C.M. Detecting and Revising Flaws in OWL Object Property Expressions. 18th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW’12), A. ten Teije et al. (Eds.). Springer, LNAI 7603, 252-266.

[6] Keet, C.M. A core ontology of macroscopic stuff. 19th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW’14). K. Janowicz et al. (Eds.). Springer LNAI vol. 8876, 209-224.

[7] Keet, C.M. The computer program as a functional whole. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems 2020 (FOIS’20). Brodaric, B and Neuhaus, F. (Eds.). IOS Press, FAIA vol. 330, 216-230.

[8] Haythem O. Ismail, Merna Shafie. A commonsense theory of secrets. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems 2020 (FOIS’20). Brodaric, B and Neuhaus, F. (Eds.). IOS Press, FAIA vol. 330, 77-91.

[9] Tiago Prince Sales, Daniele Porello, Nicola Guarino, Giancarlo Guizzardi, John Mylopoulos. Ontological foundations of competition. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems 2020 (FOIS’18). Stefano Borgo, Pascal Hitzler, Oliver Kutz (eds.). IOS Press, FAIA vol. 306, 96-109.

[10] Michael Grüninger, Carmen Chui, Yi Ru, Jona Thai. A mereology for connected structures. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems 2020 (FOIS’20). Brodaric, B and Neuhaus, F. (Eds.). IOS Press, FAIA vol. 330, 171-185.

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More detail on the ontology of pandemic

Source: https://iconscout.com/icon/corona-virus-2390401

When we can declare the covid-19 pandemic to be over? I mulled about that earlier in January this year when the omicron wave was fizzling out in South Africa, and wrote a blog post as a step toward trying to figure out and a short general public article was published by The Conversation (republished widely, including by The Next Web). That was not all and the end of it. In parallel – or, more precisely, behind the scenes – that ontological investigation did happen scientifically and in much more detail.

The conclusion is still the same, just with a more detailed analysis, which is now described in the paper entitled Exploring the ontology of pandemic [1], which was accepted at the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology 2022 recently.

First, it includes a proper discussion of how the 9 relevant domain ontologies have pandemic represented in the ontology – the same as epidemic, a sibling thereof, or as a subclass, and why – and what sort of generic top-level entity it is asserted to be, and a few more scientific references by domain experts.

Second, besides the two foundational ontologies that I discussed the alignment to (DOLCE and BFO) in the blog post, I tried with five more foundational ontologies that were selected meeting several criteria: BORO, GFO, SUMO, UFO, and YAMATO. That mainly took up a whole lot more time, but it didn’t add substantially to insights into what kind of entity pandemic is. It did, however, make clear that manually aligning is hard and difficult to get it as precise as it ought, and may need, to be, for several reasons (elaborated on in the paper).

Third, I dug deeper into the eight characteristics of pandemics according to the review by Morens, Folkers and Fauci (yes, him, from the CDC) [1] and disentangled what’s really going on with those, besides already having noted that several of them are fuzzy. Some of the characteristics aren’t really a property of pandemic itself, but of closely related entities, such as the disease (see table below). There are so many intertwined entities and relations, in fact, that one could very well develop an ontology of just pandemics, rather than have it only as a single class on an ontology as is now the case. For instance, there has to be a high attack rate, but ‘attack rate’ itself relies on the fact that there is an infectious agent that causes a disease and that R (reproduction) number that, in turn, is a complex thing that takes into account factors including susceptibility to infection, social dynamics of a population, and the ability to measure infections.

Finally, there are different ways to represent all the knowledge, or a relevant part thereof, as I also elaborated on in my Bio-Ontologies keynote last month. For instance, the attack rate could be squashed into a single data property if the calculation is done elsewhere and you don’t care how it is calculated, or it can be represented in all its glory details for the sake of it or for getting a clearer picture of what goes into computing the R number. For a scientific ontology, the latter is obviously the better choice, but there may be scenarios where the former is more practical.

The conclusion? The analysis cleared up a few things, but with some imprecise and highly complex properties as part of the mix to determine what is (and is not) a pandemic, there will be more than one optimum/finish line for a particular pandemic. To arrive at something more specific than in the paper, the domain experts may need to carry out a bit more research or come up with a consensus on how to precisiate those properties that are currently still vague.

Last, but not least, on attending ICBO’22, which will be held from 25-28 September in Ann Arbour, MI, USA: it runs in hybrid format. At the moment, I’m looking into the logistics of trying to attend in person now that we don’t have the highly anticipated ‘winter wave’ like the one we had last year and that thwarted my conference travel planning. While that takes extra time and resources to sort out, there’s that very thick silver lining that that also means we seem to be considerably closer to that real end of this pandemic (of the acute infections at least). According to the draft characterisation pandemic, one indeed might argue it’s over.

References

[1] Keet, C.M. Exploring the Ontology of Pandemic. 13th International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO’22). CEUR-WS. Michigan, USA, September 25-28, 2022.

[2] Morens, DM, Folkers, GK, Fauci, AS. What Is a Pandemic? The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2009, 200(7): 1018-1021.

What is a pandemic, ontologically?

At some point in time, this COVID-19 pandemic will be over. Each time that thought crossed my mind, there was that little homunculus in my head whispering: but do you know the criteria for when it can be declared ‘over’? I tried to push that idea away by deferring it to a ‘whenever the WHO says it’s over’, but the thought kept nagging. Surely there would be a clear set of criteria lying on the shelf awaiting to be ticked off? Now, with the omicron peak well past us here in South Africa, and with comparatively little harm done in that fourth wave, there’s more talk publicly of perhaps having that end in sight – and thus also needing to know what the decisive factors are for calling it an end.

Then there are the anti-vaxxers. I know a few of them as well. One raged on with the argument that ‘they’ (the baddies in the governments in multiple countries) count the death toll entirely unfairly: “flu deaths count per season in a year, but for covid they keep adding up to the same counter from 2020 to make the death toll look much worse!! Trying to exaggerate the severity!” My response? Duh, well, yes they do count from early 2020, because a pandemic is one event and you count per event! Since the COVID-19 pandemic is a pandemic that is an event, we count from the start until the end – whenever that end is. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that someone wouldn’t count per event but, rather, wanted to chop up an event to pretend it would be smaller than it actually is.

So I did a little digging after all. What is the definition of a pandemic? What are its characteristics? Ontologically, what is that notion of ‘pandemic’, be it according to the analytic philosophers, ontologists, or modellers, or how it may be aligned to some of the foundational ontologies used in ontology engineering? From that, we then should be able to determine when all this COVID-19 has become a ‘is not a pandemic’ (whatever it may be classified into after the pandemic is over).

I could not find any works from the philosophers and theory-focussed ontologists that would have done the work for me already. (If there is and I missed it, please let me know.) Then, to start: what about definitions? There are some, like the recently updated one from dictionary.com where they tried to explain it from a language perspective, and lots of debate and misunderstandings in the debate about defining and describing a pandemic [1]. The WHO has descriptions, but not a clear definition, and pandemic phases. Formulations of definitions elsewhere vary slightly as well, except for the lowest common denominator: it’s a large epidemic.

Ontologically, that is an entirely unsatisfying answer. What is ‘large’? Some, like the CDC of the USA qualified it somewhat: it’s spread over the world or at least multiple regions and continents, and in those areas, it usually affects many people. The Australian Department of Health adds ‘new disease’ to it. Now we’re starting to get somewhere with inclusion of key properties of a pandemic. Kelly [2] adds another criterion to it, albeit focussed on influenza: besides worldwide/very wide area and  affecting a large number of people, “almost simultaneous transmission takes place worldwide” and thus for a part of the world, there is an out-of-season influenza virus transmission.

Image credits: Miroslava Chrienova, taken from this page.

The best resource of all from an ontologists’ perspective, is a very clear, well-written, perspective article written by Morens, Folkers and Fauci – yes, that Fauci from the CDC – in the Journal of Infectious Diseases that, in their lack of wisdom, keeps the article paywalled (it somehow made it onto the webarchive with free access here anyhow). They’re experts and they trawled the literature to, if not define a pandemic, then at least describe it through trying to list the characteristics and the merits, or demerits, thereof. They are, in short, and with my annotation on what sort of attribute (/feature/characteristic, as loosely used term for now) it is:

1. Wide geographic extension; as aforementioned. That’s a scale or ‘fuzzy’ (imprecise in some way) feature, i.e., without a crisp cut-off point when ‘wide’ starts or ends.
2. Disease movement, i.e., there’s some transmission going on from place to place and that can be traced. That’s a yes/no characteristic.
3. High attack rates and explosiveness, i.e., lots of people affected in a short timespan. There’s no clear cut-off point on how fast the disease has to spread for counting as ‘fast spreading’, so a scale or fuzzy feature.
4. Minimal population immunity; while immunity is a “relative concept” (i.e., you have it to a degree), it’s a clear notion for a population when that exists or not; e.g., it certainly wasn’t there when SARS-CoV-2 started spreading. It is agnostic about how that population immunity is obtained. This may sound like a yes/no feature, perhaps, but is fuzzy, because practically we may not know and there’s for sure a grey area thanks to possible cross-immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) and due to the extent of immune-evasion of the infectious agent.
5. Novelty; the term speaks for itself, and clearly is a yes/no feature as well. It seems to me like ‘novel’ implies ‘minimal population immunity’, but that may not be the case.
6. Infectiousness; it’s got to be infectious, and so excluding non-infectious things, like obesity and smoking. Clear yes/no.
7. Contagiousness; this may be from person to person or through some other medium (like water for cholera). Perhaps as an attribute with categorical values; e.g., human-to-human, human-animal intermediary (e.g., fleas, rats), and human-environment (notably: water).
8. Severity; while the authors note that it’s not typically included, historically, the term ‘pandemic’ has been applied more often for diseases that are severe or with high fatality rates (e.g., HIV/AIDS) than for milder ones. Fuzzy concept for which a scale could be used.

And, at the end of their conclusions, “In summary, simply defining a pandemic as a large epidemic may make ultimate sense in terms of comprehensibility and consistency. We also suggest that use of the term is best reserved for infectious diseases that share many of the same epidemiologic features discussed above” (p1020), largely for simplifying it to the public, but where scientists and public health officials would maintain their more precise consensus understanding of the complex scientific concept.

Those imprecise/fuzzy properties and lack of clarity of cut-off points bug the epidemiologists, because they lead to different outcomes of their prediction models. From my ontologist viewpoint, however, we’re getting somewhere with these properties: SARS-CoV-2, at least early in 2020 when the pandemic was declared, ticked all those eight boxes and so any reasoner would classify the disease it causes, COVID-19, as a pandemic. Now, in early 2022 with/after the omicron variant of concern? Of those eight properties, numbers 4 and 8 much less so, and number 5 is the million-dollar-question two years into the pandemic. Either way, considering all those properties of a pandemic that have passed the revue here so far, calling an end to the pandemic is not as trivial is it initially may have sounded like. WHO’s “post pandemic period” phase refers to “levels seen for seasonal influenza in most countries with adequate surveillance”. That is a clear specification operationally.

Ontologically, if we were to take these eight properties at face value, the next question then is: are all eight of them combined the necessary and sufficient conditions, or are some of them ‘more essential’ for calling it a pandemic, and the other ones would then be optional features? Etymologically, the pan in pandemic means ‘all’, so then as long as it rages across the world, it would remain a pandemic?

Now that things get ontologically more interesting, the ontological status. Informally, an epidemic is an occurrence (read: instance/individual entity) of an infectious disease at a particular time (read: an unspecified duration of time, not an instant) and that affects some community (be that a community of humans, chicken, or whatever other organisms that live in a community), and pandemic, as a minimum, extends the region that it affects and amount of organisms infected, and then some of those other features listed above.

A pandemic is in the same subject domain as an infectious disease, and so we can consult the OBO Foundry and see what they did, or first start with just the main BFO categories for a general sense of what it would align to. With our BFO Classifier, I get as far as process:

As to the last (optional) question: could one argue that a pandemic is a collection of disjoint part-processes? Not if the part-processes all have to be instances of different types of processes. The other loose end is that BFO’s processes need not have an end, but pandemics do. For now, what’s the most relevant is that the pandemic is distinctly in the occurrent branch of BFO, and occurrents have temporal parts.

Digging further into the OBO Foundry, they indeed did quite some work on infectious diseases and COVID-19 already [4], and following the trail from their Figure 1 (see below): disposition is a realizable entity is a specifically dependent continuant is a continuant; infectious disease course is a disease course is a process is an occurrent; and “realizable entity comes to be realized in the course of the process”.

Source: Figure 1 of [4].

In that approach, COVID-19 is the infectious disease being realised in the pandemic we’re in at the moment, with multiple infectious disease courses in humans and a few other animals. But where does that leave us with pandemic? Inspecting the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) since the article does not give a definition, infectious disease epidemic and infectious disease pandemic are siblings of infectious disease course, where disease course is described as “Totality of all processes through which a given disease instance is realized.” (presumably the totality of all processes in one human where there’s an instance of, say, COVID-19). Infectious disease pandemic is an atomic class with no properties or formal definitions, but there’s an annotation with a definition. Nice try; won’t work.

What’s the problem? There are three. The first, and key, problem is that pandemic is stated to be a collection of epidemics, but i) collections of individual things (collectives, aggregates) are categorically different kind of entities than individual things, and ii) epidemic and pandemic are not categorically different things. Not just that, there’s a fiat boundary (along a continuum, really) between an epidemic evolving into becoming a pandemic and then subsiding into separate epidemics. A comparatively minor, or at least secondary, issue is how to determine the boundary of one epidemic from another to be able to construct a collective, since, more fundamentally: what are the respective identities of those co-occurring epidemics? One can’t get collections of things we can’t quite identify. For instance, is it one epidemic in two places that it jumped to, or do they count as two then, and what when two separate ones touch and presumably merge to become one large one? The third issue, and also minor for the current scope, is the definition for epidemic in the ontology’s annotation field, talking of “statistically significant increase in the infectious disease incidence” as determiner, but actually it’s based on a threshold.

Let’s try DOLCE as foundational ontology and see what we get there. With the DOLCE Decision Diagram [5], pandemic ends up as: Is [pandemic] something that is happening or occurring? Yes (perdurant – alike BFO’s occurrent). Are you able to be present or participate in [a pandemic]? Yes (event). Is [a pandemic] atomic, i.e., has no subdivisions of it and has a definite end point? No (accomplishment). Not the greatest word choice to say that a pandemic is an accomplishment – almost right up there with the DOLCE developers’ example that death is an achievement – but it sure is an accomplishment from the perspective of the infectious agent. The nice thing of dolce:accomplishment over  bfo:process is that it entails there’s a limited duration to it (DOLCE also has process that also can go on and on and on).

The last question in both decision diagrams made me pause. The instances of COVID-19 going around could possibly be going around after the pandemic is over, uninterrupted in the sense that there is no time interval where no-one is infected with SARS-CoV-2, or it could be interrupted with later flare-ups if it’s still SARS-CoV-2 and not substantially different, but the latter is a grey area (is it a flare-up or a COVID-2xxx?). The latter is not our problem now. The former would not be in contradiction with pandemic as accomplishment, because COVID-19-the-pandemic and COVID-19-the-disease are two different things. (How those two relate can be a separate story.)

To recap, we have pandemic as an occurrent/perdurant entity unfolding in time and, depending on one’s foundational ontology, something along the line of accomplishment. For an epidemic to be classified as a pandemic, there are a varying number of features that aren’t all crisp and for which the fuzzy boundaries haven’t been set.

To sketch this diagrammatically (hence, informally), it would look something like this:

where the clocks and the DEX and DEV arrows are borrowed from the TREND temporal conceptual data modelling language [6]: Epidemic and Pandemic are temporal entities, DEX (+dashed arrow) verbalised is “An epidemic may also become a pandemic” and DEV (+solid arrow): “Each pandemic must evolve to epidemic ceasing to be a pandemic” (hiding the logic at the back-end).

It isn’t a full answer as to what a pandemic is ontologically – hence, the title of the blog post still has that question mark – but we can already clear up the two issues from the introduction of this post, as follows.

Consequences

We already saw that with any definition, description, and list of properties proposed, there is no unambiguous and certain definite endpoint to a pandemic that can be deterministically computed. Well, other than the extremes of either 100% population immunity or the affected species is extinct such that there is no single instance of a disease course (in casu, of COVID-19) either way. Several measured values of the scales for the fuzzy variables will go down and immunity increase (further) as the pandemic unfolds, and then the pandemic phase is over eventually. Since there are no thresholds defined, there likely will be people who are forever disagreeing on when it can be called over. That is inherent in the current state of defining what a pandemic is. Perhaps it now also makes you appreciate the somewhat weak operational statement of the WHO post-pandemic period phase – specifying anything better is fraught with difficulties to date and unlikely to ever make everybody happy.

There’s that flawed argument of the anti-vaxxer to deal with still. Flu epidemics last about 10 weeks, on average [7]. They happen in the winter and in the  northern hemisphere that may cross a New Year (although I can’t remember that has ever happened in all the years I’ve lived in Europe). And yet, they also count per epidemic and not per calendar year. School years run from September to July, which provides a different sort of year, and the flu epidemics there are typically reported as ‘flu season 2014/2015’, indicating just that. Because those epidemics are short-lived, you typical get only one of those in a year, and in-season only.

Contrast this with COVID-19: it’s been going round and round and round since late December 2019, with waves and lulls for all countries, regions, and continents, but never did it stop for a season in whole regions or continents. Most countries come close to a stop during a lull at some point between the waves; for South Africa, according to worldometers, the lowest 7-day moving average since the first wave in 2020 was 265 recorded infections per day, on 7 November 2021. Any out-of-season waves? Oh yes – beta came along in summer last year and it was awful; at least for this year’s summer we got a relatively harmless omicron. And it’s not just South Africa that has been having out-of-season spikes. Point is, the COVID-19 pandemic ‘accomplishment’ wasn’t over within the year – neither a calendar year nor a northern hemisphere school year – and so we keep counting with the same counter for as long as the event takes until the pandemic as event is over. There’s no nefarious plot of evil controlling scaremongering governments, just a ‘demic that takes a while longer than we’ve been used to until 2019.

In closing, it is, perhaps, not the last word on the ontological status of pandemic, but I hope the walkthrough provided a little bit of clarity in the meantime already.

References

[1] Doshi, P. The elusive definition of pandemic influenza. Bulletin of the World Health Organization,  2011, 89:532–538

[2] Kelly, H. The classical definition of a pandemic is not elusive. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 2011, 89 (‎7)‎, 540 – 541.

[3] Morens, DM, Folkers, GK, Fauci, AS. What Is a Pandemic? The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2009, 200(7): 1018-1021.

[4] Babcock, S., Beverley, J., Cowell, L.G. et al. The Infectious Disease Ontology in the age of COVID-19. Journal of Biomedical Semantics, 2021, 12, 13.

[5] Keet, C.M., Khan, M.T., Ghidini, C. Ontology Authoring with FORZA. 22nd International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM’13). ACM proceedings, pp569-578. 2013.

[6] Keet, C.M., Berman, S. Determining the preferred representation of temporal constraints in conceptual models. 36th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’17). Springer LNCS 10650, 437-450. 6-9 Nov 2017, Valencia, Spain.

[7] Fleming DM, Zambon M, Bartelds AI, de Jong JC. The duration and magnitude of influenza epidemics: a study of surveillance data from sentinel general practices in England, Wales and the Netherlands. European Journal of Epidemiology, 1999, 15(5):467-73.

The ontological commitments embedded in a representation language

Just like programming language preferences generate heated debates, this happens every now and then with languages to represent ontologies as well. Passionate dislikes for description logics or limitations of OWL are not unheard of, in favour of, say, Common Logic for more expressiveness and a different notation style, or of OBO because of its graph-based fundamentals, or that abuse of UML Class Diagram syntax  won’t do as approximation of an OWL file. But what is really going on here? Are they practically all just the same anyway and modellers merely stick with, and defend, what they know? If you could design your pet language, what would it look like?

The short answer is: they are not all the same and interchangeable. There are actually ontological commitments baked into the language, even though in most cases this is not explicitly stated as such. The ‘things’ one has in the language indicate what the fundamental building blocks are in the world (also called “epistemological primitives” [1]) and therewith assume some philosophical stance. For instance, a crisp vs vague world (say, plain OWL or a fuzzy variant thereof) or whether parthood is such a special relation that it deserves its own primitive next to class subsumption (alike UML’s aggregation). Or maybe you want one type of class for things indicated with count nouns and another type of element for stuffs (substances generally denoted with mass nouns). This then raises the question as to what the sort of commitments are that are embedded in, or can go into, a language specification and that have an underlying philosophical point of view. This, in turn, raises the question about which philosophical stances actually can have a knock-on effect on the specification or selection of an ontology language.

My collaborator, Pablo Fillottrani, and I tried to answer these questions in the paper entitled An Analysis of Commitments in Ontology Language Design that was published late last year as part of the proceedings of the 11th Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems 2020 that was supposed to have been held in September 2020 in Bolzano, Italy. In the paper, we identified and analysed ontological commitments that are, or could have been, embedded in logics, and we showed how they have been taken for well-known languages for representing ontologies and similar artefacts, such as OBO, SKOS, OWL 2DL, DLRifd, and FOL. We organised them in four main categories: what the very fundamental furniture is (e.g., including roles or not, time), acknowledging refinements thereof (e.g., types of relations, types of classes), the logic’s interaction with natural language, and crisp vs various vagueness options. They are discussed over about 1/3 of the paper.

Obviously, engineering considerations can interfere in the design of the logic as well. They concern issues such as how the syntax should look like and whether scalability is an issue, but this is not the focus of the paper.

We did spend some time contextualising the language specification in an overall systematic engineering process of language design, which is summarised in the figure below (the paper focuses on the highlighted step).

(source: [2])

While such a process can be used for the design of a new logic, it also can be used for post hoc reconstructions of past design processes of extant logics and conceptual data modelling languages, and for choosing which one you want to use. At present, the documentation of the vast majority of published languages do not describe much of the ‘softer’ design rationales, though.  

We played with the design process to illustrate how it can work out, availing also of our requirements catalogue for ontology languages and we analysed several popular ontology languages on their commitments, which can be summed up as in the table shown below, also taken from the paper:

(source: [2])

In a roundabout way, it also suggests some explanations as to why some of those transformation algorithms aren’t always working well; e.g., any UML-to-OWL or OBO-to-OWL transformation algorithm is trying to shoe-horn one ontological commitment into another, and that can only be approximated, at best. Things have to be dropped (e.g., roles, due to standard view vs positionalism) or cannot be enforced (e.g., labels, due to natural language layer vs embedding of it in the logic), and that’ll cause some hick-ups here and there. Now you know why, and that won’t ever work well.

Hopefully, all this will feed into a way to help choosing a suitable language for the ontology one may want to develop, or assist with understanding better the language that you may be using, or perhaps gain new ideas for designing a new ontology language.

References

[1] Brachman R, Schmolze J. An overview of the KL-ONE Knowledge Representation System. Cognitive Science. 1985, 9:171–216.

[2] Fillottrani, P.R., Keet, C.M. An Analysis of Commitments in Ontology Language Design. Proc. of FOIS 2020. Brodaric, B. and Neuhaus, F. (Eds.). IOS Press. FAIA vol. 330, 46-60.

On computer program being a whole

Who cares whether some computer program is a whole, how, and why? Turns out, more people than you may think—and so should you, since it can be costly depending on the answer. Consider the following two scenarios: 1) you download a ‘pirated’ version of MS Office or Adobe Photoshop (the most popular ones still) and 2) you take the source code of a popular open source program, such as Notepad++, add a little code for some additional function, and put it up for sale only as an executable app called ‘Notepad++ extreme (NEXT)’ so as to try to earn money quickly. Are these actions legal?

In both cases, you’d break the law, but how many infringements took place, of the one that you potentially could be fined for or face jail time? For the piracy case, is that once for the MS Office suite, or for each progam in the suite, or for each file created upon installing MS office, or for each source code file that went into making the suite during software development? For the open source case, was that violating its GNU GLP open source licence once for the zipped&downloaded or cloned source code or for each file in the source code, of which there are hundreds? It is possible to construct similar questions for trade secret violations and patent infringements for programs, as well as other software artefacts, like illegal downloads of TV series episodes (going strong during COVID-19 lockdowns indeed). Just in case you think this sort of issue is merely hypothetical: recently, Arista paid Cisco $400 million for copyright damages and just before that, Zenimax got $500 million from Oculus (yes, the VR software) for trade secret violations, and Google vs Oracle is ongoing with “billions of dollars at stake”.

Let’s consider some principles first. To be able to answer the number of infringements, we first need to know whether a computer program is a whole or not and why, and if so, what’s ‘in’ (i.e., a part of it) and what’s ‘out’ (i.e., definitely not part of it). Spoiler alert: a computer program is a functional whole.

To get to that conclusion, I had to combine insights from theories of parthood (mereology), granularity, modularity, unity, and function and add a little more into the mix. To provide less and more condensed versions of the argumentation, there is a longer technical report [1], of which I hope it is readable by a wider audience, and a condensed version for a specialist audience [2] that was published in the Proceedings of the 11th Conference on Formal Ontologies in Information Systems (FOIS’20) two weeks ago. Very briefly and informally, the state of affairs can be illustrated with the following picture:

(Source: adapted from [2])

This schematic representation shows, first, two levels of granularity: level 1 and level 2. At level 1, there’s some whole, like the a1 and a2 in the figure that could be referring to, say, a computer program, a module repository, an electorate, or a human body. At a more fine-grained level 2, there are different entities, which are in some way linked to the respective whole. This ‘link’ to the whole is indicated with the vertical dashed lines, and one can say that they are part of the whole. For the blue dots on the right residing at level 2, i.e., the parts of a1, there’s also a unifying relation among the parts, indicated with the solid lines with arrows, which makes a1 an integral whole. Moreover, for that sort of whole, it holds that if some object x (residing at level 2) is part of a1 then if there’s a y that is also part of a1, it participates in that unifying relation with x and vice versa (i.e., if y is in that unifying relation with x, then it must also be part of a1). For the computer program’s source code, that unifying relation can be the source tree graph.

There is some nitty gritty detail also involving the notion of function—a source code file contributes to doing something—and optional vs mandatory vs essential part that you can read about in the report or in the paper [1,2], covering the formalisation, more argumentation, and examples.

How would it pan out for the infringements? The Notepad++ exploitation scenario would simply be a case of one infringement in total for all the files needed to create the executable, not one for each source code file. This conclusion from the theory turns out remarkably in line with the GNU GPL’s explanation of their licence, albeit then providing a theoretical foundation for their intuition that there’s a difference between a mere aggregate where different things are bundled, loose coupling (e.g., sockets and pipes) and a single program (e.g., using function calls, being included in the same executable). The order of things perhaps should have been from there into the theory, but practically, I did the analysis and stumbled into a situation where I had to look up the GPL and its explanatory FAQ. On the bright side, in the other direction now then: just  in case someone wants to take on copyleft principles of open source software, here are some theoretical foundations to support that there’s probably much less money to be gained than you might think.

For the MS Office suite case mentioned at the start, I’d need a look under the hood to determine how it ties together and one may have to argue about the sameness of, or difference between, a suite and a program. The easier case for a self-standing app, like the 3^rd-place most pirated Windows app Internet Download Manager, is that it is one whole and so one infringement then.

It’s a pity that FOIS 2020 has been postponed to 2021, but at least I got to talk about some of this as expert witness for a litigation case and I managed to weave an exercise about the source tree with open source licences into the social issues and professional practice module I thought to some 750 students this past winter.

References

[1] Keet, C.M. Why a computer program is a functional whole. Technical report 2008.07273, arXiv. 21 July 2020. 25 pages.

[2] Keet, C.M. The computer program as a functional whole. Proc. of FOIS 2020. Brodaric, B. and Neuhaus, F. (Eds.). IOS Press. FAIA vol. 330, 216-230.

Digital Assistants and AMAs with configurable ethical theories

About a year ago, there was a bit of furore in the newspapers on digital assistants, like Amazon Echo’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, or Microsoft’s Cortana, in a smart home to possibly snitch on you if you’re the marijuana-smoking family member [1,2]. This may be relevant if you live in a conservative state or country, where it is still illegal to do so. Behind it is a multi-agent system that would do some argumentation among the stakeholders (the kids, the parents, and the police). That example sure did get the students’ attention in the computer ethics class I taught last year. It did so too with an undergraduate student—double majoring in compsci and philosophy—who opted to do the independent research module. Instead of the multiple actor scenario, however, we considered it may be useful to equip such a digital assistant, or an artificial moral agent (AMA) more broadly, with multiple moral theories, so that a user would be able to select their preferred theory and let the AMA make the appropriate decision for her on whichever dilemma comes up. This seems preferable over an at-most-one-theory AMA.

(image from robotise; https://robotise.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/robot-ethics-3.jpg)

For instance, there’s the “Mia the alcoholic” moral dilemma [3]: Mia is disabled and has a new model of the carebot that can fetch her alcoholic drinks in the comfort of her home. At some point, she’s getting drunk but still orders the carebot to bring her one more tasty cocktail. Should the carebot comply? The answer depends on one’s ethical viewpoint. If you had answered with ‘yes’, you probably would not want to buy a carebot that would refuse to serve you, and likewise vv. But how to make the AMA culturally and ethically more flexible to be able to adjust to the user’s moral preferences?

The first step in that direction has now been made by that (undergrad) research student, George Rautenbach, which I supervised. The first component is a three-layered approach, with at the top layer a ‘general ethical theory’ model (called Genet) that is expressive enough to be able to model a specific ethical theory, such as utilitarianism, ethical egoism, or Divine Command Theory. This was done for those three and Kantianism, so as to have a few differences in consequence-based or not, the possible ‘patients’ of the action, sort of principles, possible thresholds and such. These reside in the middle layer. Then there’s Mia’s egoism, the parent’s Kantian viewpoint about the marijuana, a train company’s utilitarianism to sort out the trolley problem, and so on at the bottom layer, which are instantiations of the respective specific ethical theories in the middle layer.

The Genet model was evaluated by demonstrating that those four theories can be modelled with Genet and the individual theories were evaluated with a few use cases to show that the attributes stored are relevant and sufficient for those reasoning scenarios for the individuals. For instance, eventually, Mia’s egoism wouldn’t get her another drink fetched by the carebot, but as a Kantian, she would have been served.

The details are described in the technical report “Toward Equipping Artificial Moral Agents with multiple ethical theories” [4] and the models are also available for download as XML files and an OWL file. To get all this to work in a device, there’s still the actual reasoning component to implement (a few architectures exist for that) and for a user to figure out which theory they actually subscribe to so as to have the device configured accordingly. And of course, there is a range of ethical issues with digital assistants and AMAs, but that’s a topic perhaps better suited for the SIPP (FKA computer ethics) module in our compsci programme [5] and other departments.

 

p.s.: a genet is also an agile cat-like animal mostly living in Africa, just in case you were wondering about the abbreviation of the model.

 

References

[1] Swain, F. AIs could debate whether a smart assistant should snitch on you. New Scientist, 22 February 2019. Online: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2194613-ais-could-debatewhether-a-smart-assistant-should-snitch-on-you/ (last accessed: 5 March 2020).

[2] Liao, B., Slavkovik, M., van der Torre, L. Building Jiminy Cricket: An Architecture for Moral Agreements Among Stakeholders. ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society 2019, Hawaii, USA. Preprint: arXiv:1812.04741v2, 7 March 2019.

[3] Millar, J. An ethics evaluation tool for automating ethical decision-making in robotsand self-driving cars. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 30(8):787–809, 2016.

[4] Rautenbach, G., Keet, C.M. Toward equipping Artificial Moral Agents with multiple ethical theories. University of Cape Town. arxiv:2003.00935, 2 March 2020.

[5] Computer Science Department. Social Issues and Professional Practice in IT & Computing. Lecture Notes. 6 December 2019.

Computer ethics (SIPP) notes relevant to South Africa

Social issues and Professional Practice in IT & Computing (formerly known as ‘computer ethics’ in our curriculum) increased in prominence in curriculum guidelines in recent years. Also, there is an increase in popular and scientific literature on computer ethics especially since Big Data, the popularisation of Artificial Intelligence, and now the 4th Industrial Revolution. Most of the articles and books are focussed on ethical and social issues where SIPP is taught mostly, being in ‘the West’.

It is taught elsewhere as well. For instance, since the early 2000s, the Computer Science Department at the University of Cape Town has taught it as part of a Masters in IT conversion course and as a block in a first-year computer science course. While initial material and lecture notes were reused from one of those universities in ‘the West’, over time, attempts have been made to localise it to some extent at least. For instance, South Africa has its own version of EU’s GDPR (the POPI Act), there is a South African IT organisation (IITPSA) with its code of conduct, and is the textbook case that illustrates the concept of leapfrogging with its wireless network (and perhaps also with the digital divide). In addition, some ‘aspects’ look different from a country that is classified as an emerging economy than for a high-income country; e.g., as patent protection and Silicon Valley’s data collection vs. potentially stifling emerging local tech companies and digital colonialism, respectively.

Updating lecture notes takes time, and so it is typically a multi-author effort carried out every few years, as it is in this case. Differently from the previous main update, is that, in line with teaching and with the times, the lecture notes are now publicly available for free on UCT’s “Open Educational Resources” site. It is with some hesitation, as it clearly does not have the quality of a textbook and we know of certain limitations that I would have liked to be better. Yet, I hope that it may be of some use already nonetheless, be it for people in the region or from ‘outside’ looking in.

I have contributed some sections as well, partially because I think it’s an interesting theme and partially because I have to teach it. I would have liked to add more, but time was running out (i.e., it’s a balancing act with other commitments, like research, teaching, and admin). With more time, the privacy chapter would have been updated better (e.g., also touching upon privacy in the context of the common practice of mobile phone sharing), emerging concepts would have been better integrated (e.g., digital colonialism, surveillance capitalism), some of the separate exercises could have been integrated, and so on and so forth. Alas, maybe a next time. (To any of my students reading this: some of these aspects are already integrated in the slides that are used in the CSC1016S lectures, which are running ahead in content compared to the written notes, and that is examinable content as well.)

Tutorial: OntoClean in OWL and with an OWL reasoner

The novelty surrounding all things OntoClean described here, is that we made a tutorial out of a scientific paper and used an example that is different from the (in?)famous manual example to clean up a ‘dirty’ taxonomy.

I’m assuming you have at least heard of OntoClean, which is an ontology-inspired method to examine the taxonomy of an ontology, which may be useful especially when the classes (/universals/concepts/..) have no or only a few properties or attributes declared. Based on that ontological information provided by the modeller, it will highlight violations of ontological principles in the taxonomy so that the ontologist may fix it. Its most recent overview is described in Guarino & Welty’s book chapter [1] and there are handouts and slides that show some of the intermediate steps; a 1.5-page summary is included as section 5.2.2 in my textbook [2].

Besides that paper-based description [1], there have been two attempts to get the reasoning with the meta-properties going in a way that can exploit existing technologies, which are OntOWLClean [3] and OntOWL2Clean [4]. As the names suggest, those existing and widely-used mechanisms are OWL and the DL-based reasoners for OWL, and the latter uses OWL2-specific language features (such as role chains) whereas the former does not. As it happened, some of my former students of the OE course wanted to try the OntoOWLClean approach by Welty, and, as they were with three students in the mini-project team, they also had to make their own example taxonomy, and compare the two approaches. It is their—Todii Mashoko, Siseko Neti, and Banele Matsebula’s—report and materials we—Zola Mahlaza and I—have brushed up and rearranged into a tutorial on OntoClean with OWL and a DL reasoner with accompanying OWL files for the main stages in the process.

There are the two input ontologies in OWL (the domain ontology to clean and the ‘ontoclean ontology’ that codes the rules in the TBox), an ontology for the stage after punning the taxonomy into the ABox, and one after having assigned the meta-properties, so that students can check they did the steps correctly with respect to the tutorial example and instructions. The first screenshot below shows a section of the ontology after pushing the taxonomy into the ABox and having assigned the meta-properties. The second screenshot illustrates a state after having selected, started, and run the reasoner and clicked on “explain” to obtain some justifications why the ontology is inconsistent.

section of the punned ontology where meta-properties have been assigned to each new individual.

A selection of the inconsistencies (due to violating OntoClean rules) with their respective explanations

Those explanations, like shown in the second screenshot, indicate which OntoClean rule has been violated. Among others, there’s the OntoClean rule that (1) classes that are dependent may have as subclasses only those classes that are also dependent. The ontology, however, has: i) Father is dependent, ii) Male is non-dependent, and iii) Father has as subclass Male. This subsumption violates rule (1). Indeed, not all males are fathers, so it would be, at least, the other way around (fathers are males), but it also could be remodelled in the ontology such that father is a role that a male can play.

Let us look at the second generated explanation, which is about violating another OntoClean rule: (2) sortal classes have only as subclasses classes that are also sortals. Now, the ontology has: i) Ball is a sortal, ii) Sphere is a non-sortal, and iii) Ball has as subclass Sphere. This violates rule (2). So, the hierarchy has to be updated such that Sphere is not subsumed by Ball anymore. (e.g., Ball has as shape some Sphere, though note that not all balls are spherical [notably, rugby balls are not]). More explanations of the rule violations are described in the tutorial.

Seeing that there are several possible options to change the taxonomy, there is no solution ontology. We considered creating one, but there are at least two ‘levels’ that will influence what a solution may look like: one could be based on a (minimum or not) number of changes with respect to the assigned meta-properties and another on re-examining the assigned meta-properties (and then restructuring the hierarchy). In fact, and unlike the original OntoClean example, there is at least one case where there is a meta-property assignment that would generally be considered to be wrong, even though it does show the application of the OntoClean rule correctly. How best to assign a meta-property, i.e., which one it should be, is not always easy, and the student is also encouraged to consider that aspect of the method. Some guidance on how to best modify the taxonomy—like Father is-a Male vs. Father inheres-in some Male—may be found in other sections and chapters of the textbook, among other resources.

 

p.s.: this tutorial is the result of one of the activities to improve on the OE open textbook, which are funded by the DOT4D project, as was the tool to render the axioms in DL in Protégé. A few more things are in the pipeline (TBC).

 

References

[1] Guarino, N. and Welty, C. A. (2009). An overview of OntoClean. In Staab, S. and Studer, R., editors, Handbook on Ontologies, International Handbooks on Information Systems, pages 201-220. Springer.

[2] Keet, C. M. (2018). An introduction to ontology engineering. College Publications, vol 20. 344p.

[3] Welty, C. A. (2006). OntOWLClean: Cleaning OWL ontologies with OWL. In Bennett, B. and Fellbaum, C., editors, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2006), Baltimore, Maryland, USA, November 9-11, 2006, volume 150 of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, pages 347-359. IOS Press.

[4] Glimm, B., Rudolph, S., Volker, J. (2010). Integrated metamodeling and diagnosis in OWL 2. In Peter F. Patel-Schneider, Yue Pan, Pascal Hitzler, Peter Mika, Lei Zhang, Je_ Z. Pan, Ian Horrocks, and Birte Glimm, editors, Proceedings of the 9th International Semantic Web Conference, LNCS vol 6496, pages 257-272. Springer.

FOIS’18 conference report

To some perhaps surprisingly, despite being local organizer, I could attend all sessions of the 10th International Conference Formal Ontology in Information Systems as participant (cf. running around for last-minute things). It just wasn’t as much of a trip as it usually is: only 15 minutes to town at the Atlantic Imbizo conference venue, which is situated between the Clock Tower and (award-winning) Zeitz MOCAA at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront. This blog post has turned into a longer post than intended—yet, there’s still so much left out to talk about—and it is divided up into sections on keynotes, presentations, ontologies, and the (ontologically inappropriate basket of) other things.

 

Keynotes

The first keynote was presented by (emeritus) professor in philosophy Peter Simons from Trinity College Dublin and Universität Salzburg, on the ontology of aboutness (slides).

Peter Simon during his keynote talk

That may sound a bit abstract, but it is not unusual for some information system that it will have to record statements about something, such as different medical opinions, changes of policies, plans or expectations, and we need a way to represent that and deal with it. Simons discussed several earlier proposals before proposing his own, which includes as main entities a bearer, act, time, act-type, mental content, mental content type, intentional objects, referent, and referent type (slide 16), and then variants for pictorial and linguistic (speech and writing). And, in closing, his advice of “Don’t get involved in irrelevant philosophical disputes”.

The second keynote was presented by Alessandro Oltramari, who works at Bosch Research and Technology Centre in Pittsburgh, USA. He presented several of Bosch’s projects where ontologies are used in one way or another (slides) and that he was involved in. One of them was about knowledge-based intelligent IoT and another on an emergency assistant, or, in business sales parlance, a “personal guardian angel” mobile device that has location awareness, safety information of those locations, a decision support system for alternate route computation, and automatic escalation. The ontologies used include the foundational ontology DOLCE, the domain ontology of semantic sensor networks (SSN) from the W3C, and specific schemas developed in-house. Another project on a knowledge-based chatbot for healthcare policies links up DOLCE, schema.org, and some in-house schemas with Highmark-specific information (and is not ashamed of using SKOS). Om my question what methods and methodologies were used for the in-house ontology development, the (disappointing) answer was, unfortunately, only “DOLCE and OntoClean”, but the former is neither a method nor a methodology (it implies a top-down approach), and the latter is some 15 years old, as if nothing has happened in ontology engineering in the meantime (more about that further below). Regardless, it was good to see that ontologies are being used in industry.

The third keynote (slides) was by Riichiro Mizoguchi from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), on a state-centric methodology, which I’ll leave for a separate post.

Riichiro Mizoguchi during his keynote talk.

 

Presentations

The report on the presentations easily could take up several pages, but I’ll try to keep it short, lest otherwise this post never gets posted. The first session of the conference was on foundations. This included Antony Galton’s assessment of the treatment of time in upper ontologies [1]. It was mildly entertaining in that it turned out that BFO would need abstract things for its treatment of time (which it doesn’t have and doesn’t like) and adheres to Newtonian physics cf. the latest scientific theories. It is definitely on my list of papers to read in more detail. Another paper-for-printing to read is Torsten Hahmann’s work on mereotopology, which extends it to multidimensional space [2]. A nice bonus (though it ought not to be perceived as such) is that at least the theorems in the paper have been proved with Prover9 and Vampire (cf. having to double-check them manually). Laure Vieu presented a proposal for a graph-based approach to represent structure among the components of an entity [3], which is apparently different from the graph-based approach for representing molecules (within the Semantic Web context); I’ll have to look at that in more detail, for it sounds like it might be of some use for the parts aspects of part-whole relations.

Besides such theoretical contributions that are rather distant from applications, there were two of note that were motivated from praxis more clearly. One was about the ontological foundations of competition and the sort of competitive relations there are [4], which was presented by Tiago Prince Sales. The other one was presented by Pawel Garbacz, whose presentation conveyed more than the paper so as to get a real feel of the problem, being identity criteria for localities [5], with complicating use cases extracted from a Polish history project. He presented some examples of changes and a proposal for how to identify a locality/settlement. For instance, settlements can get moved altogether, have a population-only move, split into two, be merged, renamed and renamed again, deserted by a population and repopulated and renamed, and so on. When is it the same settlement and when is it another one? The paper [5] describes a first solution for identity criteria with an event-based approach to identity of localities.

My presentation on part-whole relations in Zulu language and culture [6] was scheduled in the ‘applications’ session, which had positive feedback and some pointers that may assist with future work.

 

venue during a Q&A session

Ontologies

Besides presentations, there was a discussion session on “what constitutes a good ontology paper?” for the Applied Ontology journal. Seeing the ontology papers at FOIS now, they should have done such as session for FOIS as well. There are four papers in the proceedings describing OWL files: “Amnestic forgery” (AF, conceptual metaphors) [7] presented by Mehwish Alam, UNiCS for research and innovation policy [8] presented by Fernando Roda, SAREF4Health [9] presented by João Moreira, and religious and spiritual belief (ORSB) [10] presented by Stefan Schulz. Skimming through each paper, AF, UNiCS and ORSB do not use a methodology explicitly, none of them uses existing methods, but they all do use a foundational or top-level ontology or the WordNet material, and then it’s cool enough to get into FOIS, apparently. This is a bit disappointing. At least SAREF4Health presented a set of competency questions, a systematic approach and broader framework, and some evaluation, and ORSB reuses not only top-level and top-domain ontologies but also tests some patterns. AF and ORSB have some interest to it as they’re addressing relatively novel modeling issues to solve and the ORSB discussion could be used more broadly for any “terms of dubious reference”. UNiCS is not really an ontology but an information model or, at best, a conceptual data model (e.g. calling “SCOPUS subject” an ontology is pushing it a bit too far); it makes their OBDA scenario easier to realize, true, but that’s a separate discussion. Fig 1 of SAREF4Health doesn’t look any better either, which has all the hallmarks of a plain UML Class Diagram (attributes with data types and such), with object diagram components attached and coloured in and annotated with OntoUML. SAREF4Health’s other downsides are things like “implementing the ontology as RDF” that just hurts to read (it is left implicit for AF that is plugged into the LOD cloud), as is the download in Turtle format (cf. the required exchange syntax of OWL 2), which isn’t even available at the provided link when you click on it (copy-paste gets you in the right direction), but is [I think] in some github sub-directory that has a whole bunch of ttl files with neither head nor tail, but one of them is called saref4health.ttl. On first inspection, it has plenty of data properties and data type use, and the class-as-instance issue here and there (e.g., ‘Rechargeable Lithium Polymer battery’ as instance cf. class), and others (e.g., a ‘series’ of measurements is not a subclass of a measurement) and very many classes directly subsumed by top, though some are knock-on effects from imports.

And then ontologists at FOIS deplored that there are many domain ontologies that are of poor quality and artifacts presented as ontologies but aren’t. The FOIS reviewers themselves apparently can’t even get their act together in the reviewing process, where artifacts that are sold as domain ontologies but aren’t (UNiCS, SAREF4Health) make it not only through the reviewing process but, moreover, even get a best paper award from the PC chairs (SAREF4Health). The PC chairs wanted to make a political statement to communicate that FOIS accepts domain ontology papers. It is good that the FOIS topics are becoming less narrow and I’m not saying they are pointless papers or lousy artifacts per sé—they are useful reference papers and UNiCS and SAREF4Health perform the application tasks they’re supposed to be performing, which is a good thing. Maybe, collectively, ontology developers can’t do better or don’t need to do better w.r.t. applied ontology? Either way, once upon a time there were principles for what ontologies are; what happened to that? Also, there are multiple methodologies for domain ontology development, and there are a myriad of methods and tools, which have been mostly ignored. For instance, using one foundational ontology over another ‘just because I know x’ is neither a scientific nor a sound engineering approach. There are comparisons, requirements, and a mix of the two to help you figure out which one is the best to use; an early tool for that is ONSET, the ONtology Selection and Explanation Tool, developed by Zubeida Khan (more data). To name one example.

Coincidentally, ontology engineering papers with such a content do not, or very rarely, make it into FOIS; but just that they don’t (because they’re typically not philosophical enough), doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Just in case a FOIS ontologist would like to explore methods, methodologies and tools for ontology development: ESWC, EKAW, and K-CAP are good/top conferences covering such topics in whole or in part, and Chapter 5 of the ontology engineering textbook provides a sampling as well (as do some other sections in Block II). Considering my critical comments, one may ask whether my ontologies and ontology papers are any better, or anyone else’s for that matter. Perhaps, perhaps not. You can check for yourself some of my recent papers on domain ontologies that also have OWL files[1] that I was involved in developing; one paper was intended as a reference paper for the domain ontology [11], another paper was a bit of both domain ontology and some framework [12], and yet another turned into a core ontology [13] (v1, with the main categories; there’s an updated version for the relations).

Anyway, returning to the first sentence of this section: the open forum discussion did not make it any clearer as to what would be the characteristics of a good ontology paper for the Applied Ontology journal (or FOIS, for that matter). Mainly just Protégé screenshots certainly is not, but opinions varied as to what would be. Going by examples of the ontology papers that made it through: use of a top-level or foundational ontology and some modeling issues and solutions seems to be preferred, evaluation and usage & uptake as a nice-to-have. Is developing an (domain) ontology science? That question wasn’t answered unanimously; I think it was leaning towards a ‘mostly no’ w.r.t. applied ontology but it may be if it’s the first to solve a modeling issue. How to evaluate the ontology? Another question without a satisfactory answer. Overall, the criteria for an ontology paper—let alone for the ontology itself—are “TBD” and meanwhile one has to hope that one will get a supportive ‘reviewer 2’.

 

Other

In case you have clicked-though to one or more of the listed papers, you may have noticed that the FOIS’18 proceedings are Open Access—paid for by those who registered for the conference (it was calculated in the registration fee). I suppose the next FOIS organisers and the IAOA exec may like your opinion on that approach.

mentors of the early career symposium papers

Besides the best paper award for SAREF4Health [9], there were two “distinguished paper awards”, which went to aforementioned paper on the graph-based approach for structured universals by Laure Vieu and Claudio Masolo [3] and to the foundational ontologies for units of measure by Michael Grüninger and co-authors [14]. The early career symposium went well and from hearsay they had a good social activity, too. There were lots of interesting conversations, networking, good food, and so on, and lots more to write about. There are also more photos.

Some of the postgraduate students and a recent PhD graduate in the spotlight at the closing ceremony, being thanked for chairing the sessions.

Last, but not least: the next FOIS in 2020 will be in Bolzano, Italy, as part of a ‘Bolzano summer of knowledge’ with more co-located conferences, workshops, and summer schools.

 

References

[1] Antony Galton. The treatment of time in upper ontologies. Proc. of FOIS’18. IOS Press, 306: 33-46.

[2] Thorsten Hahmann. On Decomposition Operations in a Theory of Multidimensional Qualitative Space. Proc. of FOIS’18. IOS Press, 306: 173-186.

[3] Claudio Masolo, Laure Vieu. Graph-Based Approaches to Structural Universals and Complex States of Affairs. Proc. of FOIS’18. IOS Press, 306: 69-82.

[4] Tiago Prince Sales, Daniele Porello, Nicola Guarino, Giancarlo Guizzardi, John Mylopoulos. Ontological Foundations of Competition. Proc. of FOIS’18. IOS Press, 306: 96-112.

[5] Pawel Garbacz, Agnieszka Ławrynowicz, Bogumił Szady. Identity criteria for localities. Proc. of FOIS’18. IOS Press, 306: 47-56.

[6] C. Maria Keet, Langa Khumalo. On the Ontology of Part-Whole Relations in Zulu Language and Culture. Proc. of FOIS’18. IOS Press, 306: 225-238.

[7] Aldo Gangemi, Mehwish Alam, Valentina Presutti. Amnestic Forgery: An Ontology of Conceptual Metaphors. Proc. of FOIS’18. IOS Press, 306: 159-172.

[8] Alessandro Mosca, Fernando Roda, Guillem Rull. UNiCS – The Ontology for Research and Innovation Policy Making. Proc. of FOIS’18. IOS Press, 306: 200-210.

[9] João Moreira, Luís Ferreira Pires, Marten van Sinderen, Laura Daniele. SAREF4health: IoT Standard-Based Ontology-Driven Healthcare Systems. Proc. of FOIS’18. IOS Press, 306: 239-252.

[10] Stefan Schulz, Ludger Jansen. Towards an Ontology of Religious and Spiritual Belief. Proc. of FOIS’18. IOS Press, 306: 253-260.

[11] Keet, C.M., Lawrynowicz, A., d’Amato, C., Kalousis, A., Nguyen, P., Palma, R., Stevens, R., Hilario, M. The Data Mining OPtimization ontology. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 2015, 32:43-53.

[12] Chavula, C., Keet, C.M. An Orchestration Framework for Linguistic Task Ontologies. 9th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (MTSR’15), Garoufallou, E. et al. (Eds.). Springer CCIS vol. 544, 3-14.

[13] Keet, C.M. A core ontology of macroscopic stuff. 19th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW’14). K. Janowicz et al. (Eds.). 24-28 Nov, 2014, Linkoping, Sweden. Springer LNAI vol. 8876, 209-224.

[14] Michael Grüninger, Bahar Aameri, Carmen Chui, Torsten Hahmann, Yi Ru. Foundational Ontologies for Units of Measure. Proc. of FOIS’18. IOS Press, 306: 211-224.

[1] I have others developed as part of methods & tools research

ISAO 2018, Cape Town, ‘trip’ report

The Fourth Interdisciplinary School on Applied Ontology has just come to an end, after five days of lectures, mini-projects, a poster session, exercises, and social activities spread over six days from 10 to 15 September in Cape Town on the UCT campus. It’s not exactly fair to call this a ‘trip report’, as I was the local organizer and one of the lecturers, but it’s a brief recap ‘trip report kind of blog post’ nonetheless.

The scientific programme consisted of lectures and tutorials on:

• Mereology, location, and time by Prof. Maureen Donnelly (with the Department of Philosophy from the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA);
• Biomedical Ontology by Prof. Stefan Schulz (with the Medical University in Graz, Austria);
• Foundations of Description Logics by Prof. Arina Britz (with the Department of Information Science, Stellenbosch University);
• Semantics and conceptual modeling by myself;
• Ontology for robotics by Dr. Stefano Borgo (with the Laboratory for Applied Ontology, CNR, in Trento, Italy);
• Applied mereolgy by Prof. Peter Simons (emeritus, with Trinity College Dublin, Ireland).

The linked slides (titles of the lectures, above) reveal only part of the contents covered, though. There were useful group exercises and plenary discussion with the ontological analysis of medical terms such as what a headache is, a tooth extraction, blood, or aspirin, an exercises on putting into practice the design process of a conceptual modelling language of one’s liking (e.g.: how to formalize flowcharts, including an ontological analysis of what those elements are and ontological commitments embedded in a language), and trying to prove some theorems of parthood theories.

There was also a session with 2-minute ‘blitztalks’ by participants interested in briefly describing their ongoing research, which was followed by an interactive poster session.

It was the first time that an ISAO had mini-projects, which turned out to have had better outcomes than I expected, considering the limited time available for it. Each group had to pick a term and investigate what it meant in the various disciplines (task description); e.g.: what does ‘concept’ or ‘category’ mean in psychology, ontology, data science, and linguistics, and ‘function’ in manufacturing, society, medicine, and anatomy? The presentations at the end of the week by each group were interesting and most of the material presented there easily could be added to the IAOA Education wiki’s term list (an activity in progress).

What was not a first-time activity, was the Ontology Pub Quiz, which is a bit of a merger of scientific programme and social activity. We created a new version based on questions from several ISAO’18 lecturers and a few relevant questions created earlier (questions and answers; we did only questions 1-3,6-7). We tried a new format compared to the ISAO’16 quiz and JOWO’17 quiz: each team had 5 minutes to answer a set of 5 questions, and another team marked the answers. This set-up was not as hectic as the other format, and resulted in more within-team interaction cf. among all participants interaction. As in prior editions, some questions and answers were debatable (and there’s still the plan to make note of that and fix it—or you could write an article about it, perhaps :)). The students of the winning team received 2 years free IAOA membership (and chocolate for all team members) and the students of the other two teams received one year free IAOA membership.

Impression of part of the poster session area, moving into the welcome reception

As with the three previous ISAO editions, there was also a social programme, which aimed to facilitate getting to know one another, networking, and have time for scientific conversations. On the first day, the poster session eased into a welcome reception (after a brief wine lapse in the coffee break before the blitztalks). The second day had an activity to stretch the legs after the lectures and before the mini-project work, which was a Bachata dance lesson by Angus Prince from Evolution Dance. Not everyone was eager at the start, but it turned out an enjoyable and entertaining hour. Wednesday was supposed to be a hike up the iconic Table Mountain, but of all the dry days we’ve had here in Cape Town, on that day it was cloudy and rainy, so an alternative plan of indoor chocolate tasting in the Biscuit Mill was devised and executed. Thursday evening was an evening off (from scheduled activities, at least), and Friday early evening we had the pub quiz in the UCT club (the campus pub). Although there was no official planning for Saturday afternoon after the morning lectures, there was again an attempt at Table Mountain, concluding the week.

The participants came from all over the world, including relatively many from Southern Africa with participants coming also from Botswana and Mauritius, besides several universities in South Africa (UCT, SUN, CUT). I hope everyone has learned something from the programme that is or will be of use, enjoyed the social programme, and made some useful new contacts and/or solidified existing ones. I look forward to seeing you all at the next ISAO or, better, FOIS, in 2020 in Bolzano, Italy.

Finally, as a non-trip-report comment from my local chairing viewpoint: special thanks go to the volunteers Zubeida Khan for the ISAO website, Zola Mahlaza and Michael Harrison for on-site assistance, and Sam Chetty for the IT admin.