Tue, Aug 05, 2003
OHS Launch Community: Experimenting with Ontologies
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My review of The
Semantic Web resulted in some very interesting
comments.
In particular, DannyAyers challenged my point about focusing on
human-understandable ontologies rather than machine-understandable
ones: (5D)
But..."I think it would be significantly cheaper and more valuable to develop better ways of expressing human-understandable ontologies". I agree with your underlying point here, but think it's just the kind of the Semantic Web technologies can help with. The model used is basically very human-friendly - just saying stuff about things, using (triple) statements. (5E)
Two years ago, I set out to test this very claim by creating an ad-hoc
community -- the OHS Launch Community
-- and by making the creation of a shared ontology one of our
primary goals. I'll
describe that experience here, and will address the comments in more
detail later. (For now, see JayFienberg?'s blog entry,
"Semantic web
2003: not unlike TRS-80 in the 1970's." Jay makes a point that I
want to echo in a later post.) (5F)
"Ontologies?!" (5G)
I first got involved with Doug
Engelbart's Open Hyperdocument System
(OHS) project in April 2000. For the next six months, a small group
of committed volunteers met weekly with Doug to spec out the project
and develop strategy. (5H)
While some great things emerged from our efforts, we ultimately
failed. There were a lot of reasons for that failure -- I could write
a book on this topic -- but one of the most important reasons was that
we never developed SharedLanguage. (5I)
We had all brought our own world-views to the project, and -- more
problematically -- we used the same terms differently. We did not
have to agree on a single world-view -- on the contrary, that would
have hurt the collaborative process. However, we did need to be aware
of each other's world-views, even if we disagreed with them, and we
needed to develop a SharedLanguage that would enable us to communicate
more effectively. (5J)
I think many people understand this intuitively. I was lucky enough
to have it thrown in my face, thanks to the efforts of JackPark and
HowardLiu?. At the time, Jack and Howard worked at VerticalNet? with
LeoObrst?, one of the authors of The Semantic Web. Howard, in
fact, was an Ontologist. That was his actual job title! I had taken
enough philosophy in college to know what an ontology was in that
context, but somehow, I didn't think that had any relevance to
Howard's job at VerticalNet?. (5K)
At our meetings, Jack kept saying we needed to work out an ontology.
Very few of us knew what he meant, and both Jack and Howard did a very
poor job of explaining what an ontology was. I mention this not to
dis Jack and Howard -- both of whom I like and respect very much --
but to make a point about the entire ontology community. In general,
I've found that ontologists are very poor at explaining what an
ontology is. This is somewhat ironic, given that ontologies are
supposed to clarify meaning in ways that a simple glossary can not. (5L)
Doug himself made this same point in his usual ridiculously lucid
manner. He often asked, "How does the ontology community use
ontologies?" If ontologies were so crucial to effective
collaboration, then surely the ontology community used ontologies when
collaborating with each other. Sadly, nobody ever answered his
question. (5M)
OHS Launch Community (5N)
At some point, something clicked. I finally understood what
ontologies (in an information sciences context) were, and I realized
that developing a shared ontology was an absolute prerequisite for
collaboration to take place. Every successful communities of practice
had developed a shared ontology, whether they were aware of it or not. (5O)
Not wanting our OHS efforts to fade into oblivion, I asked a subset of
the volunteers to participate in a community experiment, which -- at
Doug's suggestion -- we called the OHS Launch Community. Our goal was
not to develop the OHS. Our goal was to figure out what we all
thought the OHS was. We would devote six-months towards this goal,
and then decide what to do afterwards. My theory was that
collectively creating an explicit ontology would be a tipping point in
the collaborative process. Once we had an ontology, progress on the
OHS would flow naturally. (5P)
My first recruits were Jack and Howard, and Howard agreed to be our
ontology master. We had a real, live Ontologist as our ontology
master! How could we fail?! (5Q)
Mixed Results (5R)
Howard suggested using Protege as our
tool for developing an ontology. He argued that the group would find
the rigor of a formally expressed ontology useful, and that we could
subsequently use the ontology for developing more-intelligent search
mechanisms into our knowledge repository. (5S)
We agreed. Howard and I then created a highly iterative process for
developing the formal ontology. Howard would read
papers and follow
mailing list discussions
carefully, construct the ontology, and post updated versions early and
often. He would also use Protege on an overhead projector during
face-to-face discussions, so that people could watch the ontology
evolve in real-time. (5T)
Howard made enough progress to make things interesting. He developed
some preliminary
ontologies from some papers he had read, and he demonstrated and
explained this work at one of our first meetings. Unfortunately,
things suddenly got very busy for him, and he had to drop out of the
group. (5U)
That was the end of the formal ontology part of the experiment, but
not of the experiment itself. First, we helped ourselves by
collectively agreeing that developing a shared ontology was a
worthwhile goal. This, and picking an end-date, helped us eliminate
some of the urgency and anxiety about "making progress." Developing
SharedLanguage can be a frustrating experience, and it was extremely
valuable to have group buy-in about its importance up-front. (5V)
Second, we experimented with a facilitation technique called
DialogMapping. Despite my complete
lack of experience
with this technique (I had literally learned it from JeffConklin, its
creator, the day before our first meeting), it turned out to be
extremely useful. We organized a meeting called, "Ask Doug Anything,"
which I facilitated and captured using a tool called QuestMap?. It was
essentially the SocraticMethod? in reverse. We asked questions, and
Doug answered them. The only way we were allowed to challenge him or
make points of our own was in the form of a question. (5W)
That meeting was a watershed for me, because I finally understood
Doug's definition of a DynamicKnowledgeRepository. (See the
dialog map of
that discussion.) One of the biggest mistakes people make when
discussing Doug's work is conflating OpenHyperdocumentSystem with
DynamicKnowledgeRepository. Most of us had made that mistake, which
prevented us from communicating clearly with Doug, and from making
progress overall. (5X)
Epilogue (5Y)
We ended the Launch Community on November 9, 2001, about five months
after it launched. We never completed the ontology experiment to my
satisfaction, but I definitely learned many things. We also
accomplished many of our other goals. We wanted to be a bootstrapping
community, EatingOurOwnDogfood?, running a lot of experiments, and
keeping records of our experiences. We also wanted to facilitate
collaboration between our members, most of whom were tool developers.
Among our many accomplishments were: (5Z)
The experiment was successful enough for me to propose a refined
version of the group as an official entity of the
Bootstrap Alliance, called the OHS Working
Group. The proposal was accepted, but sadly, got sidetracked. (Yet
another story for another time.) In many ways, the
Blue Oxen collaboratories are the
successors to the OHS Working Group experiment. We've adopted many of
the same principles, especially the importance of SharedLanguage and
bootstrapping. (64)
I believe, more than ever, that developing shared ontology needs to be
an explicit activity when collaborating in any domain. I'll discuss
where or whether Semantic Web technologies fit in, in a later post. (65)
/collaboration/experiments |
Posted at 9:52am
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