[Fwd: Re: [seek-kr-sms] ontology/folder UI design in Kepler]

[Shawn Bowers]

I just wanted to address your comment:

> That said, my first comment is does anyone expect Kepler users to be
> knowledgeable about formal ontologies and formal representations of
> ontologies?  Frankly, from the user profiling I've done and the data I've
> gathered so far, I don't.  We are already introducing new concepts to them
> -- the ecogrid, the whole issue of how metadata is employed and used, and
> the workflow mechanism itself.  And while at a very abstract level the
> notion of scientific workflows is not difficult, the devil is always in the
> details and there are many details for users to learn to fully exploit
> Kepler.

I think that this is (or at least was) exactly one of the "missions" in 
SEEK: to get scientists involved in creating and using *formal* ontologies.

Remember that ontologies are a means to enable one to (more) precisely 
capture meaning ... which is why they are often difficult to create (one 
has to really understand their own assumptions, etc.). The other side of 
the puzzle is that the languages and interfaces that exist for creating 
ontologies are generally more focused on "engineers", be that so-called 
"knowledge engineers" or programmers/developers. The same can also be 
said of Ptolemy and Kepler in its current state (i.e., it is a tool not 
necessarily for scientists, but for programmers/developers). 
Ultimately, however, I think we are short-selling the ability of 
ecologists when we say ontologies are too complex for them: ecologists 
(like other scientists) currently understand in a very deep way the 
things they are expert in; and compared with this knowledge, the 
ontologies a scientist would develop are at best an approximation of 
this complex knowledge. From my own experience with the EOT meetings, I 
have found people to be generally excited by not only discussing their 
own research and knowledge, but also in attempting to formalize this 
information and being able to communicate it to others.

So to answer your question: yes, if we are talking about scientists as 
users, then we do expect that they are knowledgeable about formal 
ontologies (this is exactly their knowledge); and no, we do not expect 
them to be knowledgeable about formal representations of ontologies -- 
this is precisely the challenge of SEEK and other projects like SEEK wrt 
ontologies.

In general, I sense that as a group we might be somewhat unsure of and 
do not have a clear vision as to how we want to proceed with ontologies.
One approach is as above -- engage scientists and develop tools for 
scientists to actively participate with and develop their own conceptual 
models. Another approach is to essentially move away from "formal" (or 
"structured") conceptual models and instead embrace simpler thesauri or 
keyword-based approaches ("informal" and "unstructured" ontologies) more 
akin to digital libraries where little effort is required to create a 
"knowledge" corpus -- and users do not have to be (nor have the option 
of being) actively engaged at the "conceptual level" except through 
essentially undefined keywords.