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The goal of the National Center for Ontological Research is to advance ontological investigation within the United States. NCOR serves as a vehicle to coordinate, to enhance, to publicize, and to seek funding for ontological research activities. It lays a special focus on ontology training and on the establishment of tools and measures for quality assurance of ontologies.
NCOR provides ontology services to the US Army and to the US Joint Forces Command.
Defining Ontology
An ontology is a representation of some part of reality, (e.g. medicine, social reality, physics, etc.). Smith states that: “Ontology is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality…Ontology seeks to provide a definitive and exhaustive classification of entities in all spheres of being.”1 To be an accurate representation of reality an ontology includes the types of entities and events in a given domain (along with their definitions) arranged in a hierarchical structure, along with relations (such as part-of, depends-on, caused-by, etc. where necessary). Ontologies enable the formulation of robust and shareable descriptions of a given domain by providing a common controlled vocabulary for doctrine writers, IT Developers, and war-fighters alike, thereby allowing these disparate communities to communicate with each other. An ontology should be a shared resource between communities, and its continued collaborative development should support the integration of information and facilitate knowledge discovery.2 These two goals are realized by ensuring wide dissemination of the ontology, so that it will be used by many stakeholders, and its terms will be correspondingly familiar and readily used for search.
Avoiding Perspective-Relative Silos
Ontologies are often mischaracterized as taxonomies intended to represent some person’s (or community’s) perspective. However, the creation of perspective-relative taxonomies results in idiosyncratic and incompatible views of reality. For example, a Targeting Officer maintains a targeting perspective, which results in the categorization of buildings, vehicles, and people as being all “targets”. Likewise, a logistics planner will maintain a logistics perspective, which results in the categorization of buildings as “facilities”, vehicles as “cargo”, and people as “passengers”. All of these things are also targets. It is precisely the perspective-relative approach to creating data models and taxonomies that results in data silos.
Furthermore, these perspectives are not accurate descriptions of reality; a building is not a target, a vehicle is not cargo, and a person is not a passenger. Rather, what is accurate to say is that a building is in the “target role” for some temporal period (just as a person can be in a “passenger role”, and a vehicle in a “cargo role”). From the perspective-neutral point of view, a building is “a facility which is a relatively permanent enclosed construction over a plot of land, having a roof and usually windows and often more than one level, used for any of a wide variety of activities, as living, entertaining, or manufacturing” (Merriam Webster's Online Dictionary) The same building can be in any number of roles: house, community center, business, or target. In regards to perspective-relative taxonomies, Sharon Flank states that, “Taxonomies purport to map the way you think, so you can find what you want. Unfortunately, you don’t think the way I think, and your colleagues won’t necessarily think the way you think either ...” (Flank, Sharon "Why Taxonomies are Doomed" http://www.docstoc.com/docs/38833312/Why-Taxonomies-Are-Doomed)
Flank goes on to state that: “If your taxonomy needs to support long-term needs in a business or archive, it cannot afford personal idiosyncrasies. But idiosyncrasies are notoriously difficult to avoid … once you have a taxonomy, you aren’t finished. As the world changes, you need to update it and maintain it. Does anthrax belong under Weapons of Mass Destruction, or does it just stay under Diseases?" The problems identified by Flank are avoided through adoption of the perspective-neutral approach to ontology. The latter creates the conditions for avoiding those perspective-relative (idiosyncratic) and relatively unstable taxonomies, which are the cause of data silos. As has been shown in other domains—for example in biology— the problems identified by Flank can be greatly diminished (or eliminated altogether) by adherence to best practices for creating an ontology. (B, Smith, et al., “The OBO Foundry: Coordinated Evolution of Ontologies to Support Biomedical Data Integration”, Nature Biotechnology,25 (11), November 2007, 1251 -1255. http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v25/n11/pdf/nbt1346.pdf)
So, how would a reality-centric (perspective-neutral) ontology treat the Anthrax example? Properly speaking, Anthrax is not a Weapon of Mass Destruction —if this actually needs to be said. A disease ontology would properly define Anthrax as, “an infectious disease of warm-blooded animals (as cattle and sheep) caused by a spore-forming bacterium (Bacillus anthracis), transmissible to humans especially by the handling of infected products (as wool), and characterized by cutaneous ulcerating nodules or by often fatal lesions in the lungs.” (Merriam Webster's Online Dictionary). This same Anthrax Ontology would include Bacillus anthracis as the cause_of Anthrax. Furthermore, the ontology may also include the Bacillus anthracis bacterium in an enhancement_role used in a weapon of mass destruction.
