3 ms·

It's a textbook collective action problem. Everyone would gain from having a high-quality shared ontology, but nobody gains enough individually (it's a public g

It's a textbook collective action problem. Everyone would gain from having a high-quality shared ontology, but nobody gains enough individually (it's a public good). The typical solutions to collective action problems are (1) benefactors who subsidise production (either privately or through taxation), or (2) direct command and control. Google was apparently filling the role of benefactor.

PeterisP 6y ago
I'm not even sure if everyone would gain from having a high-quality shared ontology, because as soon as you go beyond trivial examples, the details of the data model inevitably have competing incompatible needs which require some compromise. I could certainly imagine that for many companies the disadvantages of using a model that's not simply a copy of their specific view of that problem domain are larger than the hypothetical benefits of interoperability, so even if such a shared ontology would exist, many would intentionally choose to use their own ontology instead of adapting to that standard.
- mandevil 6y ago
  At one point I worked at a company founded in 2005ish, so one of their core things was an ontology. We found that while some very generic things were reusable (person and address, say) almost everything that drove business logic was different, use case to use case.
- majormajor 6y ago
  Yeah, trying to standardize this seems like it would quickly turn into one of those "things people believe about time" rabbit-holes of edge cases and differences. Even inside a single company I get scared now when someone says "if only we had just one standard way to handle this sort of thing"... if it's rarely simple for just one company, how would it work globally?
- breck 6y ago
  This is a really good point. Without substantial benefits of a large universal ontology and without the ability to painlessly diverge from an ontology to not compromise on accurately modeling a particular domain, it’s hard to see the net benefits. Everyone will want to customize things for their domain, or point of view. An ontology should be easy to fork, like a repo.
- smoe 6y ago
  I think even in those cases there are benefits. I would certainly want to extend, modify and replace the data models for my core business as I see fit. But beyond those there are still going to be a whole lot of models in need in order to run the company but want to keep low maintenance. E.g. for hiring I might not have strong opinions what a job post, a candidate or an application should look like, so I'd be happy sticking to the standard in those cases and benefit of it being easier to mix and match tooling and pass around the data. Also I reckon to me that a partially customized ontology, which is inevitable, is still easier to map between orgs than if they build it from scratch completely Or maybe see it less as a standardized ontology but as a standardized way to create ontologies
fnord77 6y ago
this is where NIST or a similar agency could step in.

PeterisP 6y ago

I'm not even sure if everyone would gain from having a high-quality shared ontology, because as soon as you go beyond trivial examples, the details of the data model inevitably have competing incompatible needs which require some compromise. I could certainly imagine that for many companies the disadvantages of using a model that's not simply a copy of their specific view of that problem domain are larger than the hypothetical benefits of interoperability, so even if such a shared ontology would exist, many would intentionally choose to use their own ontology instead of adapting to that standard.

mandevil 6y ago
At one point I worked at a company founded in 2005ish, so one of their core things was an ontology. We found that while some very generic things were reusable (person and address, say) almost everything that drove business logic was different, use case to use case.
majormajor 6y ago
Yeah, trying to standardize this seems like it would quickly turn into one of those "things people believe about time" rabbit-holes of edge cases and differences. Even inside a single company I get scared now when someone says "if only we had just one standard way to handle this sort of thing"... if it's rarely simple for just one company, how would it work globally?
breck 6y ago
This is a really good point. Without substantial benefits of a large universal ontology and without the ability to painlessly diverge from an ontology to not compromise on accurately modeling a particular domain, it’s hard to see the net benefits. Everyone will want to customize things for their domain, or point of view. An ontology should be easy to fork, like a repo.
smoe 6y ago
I think even in those cases there are benefits. I would certainly want to extend, modify and replace the data models for my core business as I see fit. But beyond those there are still going to be a whole lot of models in need in order to run the company but want to keep low maintenance. E.g. for hiring I might not have strong opinions what a job post, a candidate or an application should look like, so I'd be happy sticking to the standard in those cases and benefit of it being easier to mix and match tooling and pass around the data. Also I reckon to me that a partially customized ontology, which is inevitable, is still easier to map between orgs than if they build it from scratch completely Or maybe see it less as a standardized ontology but as a standardized way to create ontologies

fnord77 6y ago

this is where NIST or a similar agency could step in.