Dear List People, Another view, and my two (euro) cents, for what they are worth:-
There are many philosophical difficulties in the concept of semantic interoperability which technology cannot address. Put simply, semantic interoperability requires an agreement on meaning, and meaning is not a 'thing'. Semantic interoperability requires uses of a system to think in the same way - or at least in mutually understandable ways - and informaticians do not (yet) have the power to change the ways people think. So semantic interoperability is a kind of philosopher's stone. The search for the original philosopher's stone, which could turn base metal into gold, simply showed that alchemists misunderstood chemistry and sub-atomic physics. Maybe the search for semantic interoperability simply shows that informaticians misunderstand linguistics and the nature of knowledge. OK - you can shoot me down now...... Derek. ----- Original Message ----- From: Seref Arikan <[email protected]> Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 11:50 am Subject: Layers of interoperability, OWL and openEHR To: openehr-technical at openehr.org > Dear members of the list, > I'd appreciate your opinions and guidance about a particular topic. > As most > of you probably know, the work in the ontology domain has been the > flagshipof semantic interoperability for many projects now, and > there is a large > amount of researchers active in the field. > I've been involved in use of ontologies for semantic > interoperability for > the first time in 2002, and since then, ontologies have become a > frequentlypronounced solution for a large set of problems. > However, I have a feeling that the nature of this work creates just > a layer > in the multilayer interoperability space. Expressing relationships > amongdifferent entities and doing this in a formal way (OWL) is > nice. OWL also > allows you to do processing, reasoning on the defined > relationships, but > unless I'm missing something, this is all about relationships, and > concepts.I mean the capabilities of OWL seem to be valid in the > relationships is > defines. > What about the actual things, data items, entities that OWL links > together?I've been a proponent of well defined type systems and > object hieararchies > in healthcare interoperability solutions, since I've spent years in > thesoftware development side of the domain, and a huge number of > issues arise > from the developers interpreting losely defined types, or inventing > theirown types. > Now pinning down concepts either by using terminologies or > ontologies is > good. It is good to know that two fields on two different data > structuresare pointing to the same concept. This however, is the > beginning of the > process. Pointing at the same thing and processing it in the same > way are > different things. Just because we agree that we are pointing to body > temperature in two different documents does not stop us from > processing one > of them with a double, and the other one with a float. > There is a great deal of information out there expressed in the > form of OWL, > or other formalisms, but I can't see this covering all aspects of > interoperability, but (no offense) there is a large crowd out there > whothink they have solved the problem of semantic interoperability. > Though it > may be an undervaluation of the work, "mappings" are nice, but they > don'tease the rest of the work, where mapped items are processed in > differentdomains. > Are there resources or works that you know of, that try to link > type systems > in openEHR or other formalisms like 13606 or HL7 to these semantic > expressions? How does a DVQuantity instance and an OWL expression play > together? > > Best Regards > Seref > -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: dmeyer.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 175 bytes Desc: Card for Derek Meyer <dmeyer at sgul.ac.uk> URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20090421/0c6bead5/attachment.vcf>
