For the sake of simplicity: Applying software design parsimony to the content of information system ontologies
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
Although many information system ontologies (ISOs) claim to be parsimonious, the notion of parsimony seems to influence the debate on ISOs only at the level of vague and uncritical assumption. To challenge this trend, the paper aims to clarify what it means for ISOs to be parsimonious. Specifically, section 2 shows that parsimony in computer science generally concerns software design and, together with elegance, is one of the two aspects of the broader notion of simplicity. Section 3 transforms the main claims of parsimony in software design into claims about the content of ISOs, the combination of which is hereafter called “parsimony of content”—where “content” refers only to the content of ISOs. Sections 4-7 discuss the application of this parsimony to the design of ISOs, and outline different kinds (and combinations) of parsimony of content. Finally, section 8 considers whether parsimony of content could provide some criteria both for selecting and/or classifying the contents of ISOs and for choosing between different and equally consistent ISOs.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
References
Allen, R.J., 1997. A Formal Approach to Software Architecture (CMU Technical Report CMU-CS-97-144). (technical report). Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon, School of Computer Science.
Baker, A., 2016. Simplicity. In: E.N. Zalta, ed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter 2016. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Available at: <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/simplicity/> [visited on 29 January 2024].
Baljon, C.J., 2002. History of history and canons of design. Design Studies. Philosophy of design, 23(3), pp.333–343. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0142-694X(01)00042-4.
Bentley, J.L. and McIlroy, M.D., 1993. Engineering a sort function. Software: Practice and Experience, 23(11), pp.1249–1265. https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380231105.
Bernaras, A., Laresgoiti, I. and Corera, J., 1996. Building and Reusing Ontologies for Electrical Network Applications. In: W. Wahlster, ed. Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI’96). Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, pp.298–302.
Borst, W.N., 1997. Construction of Engineering Ontologies for Knowledge Sharing and Reuse. PhD thesis. University of Twente, Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT). Available at: <https://research.utwente.nl/en/publications/construction-of-engineering-ontologies-for-knowledge-sharing-and-> [visited on 31 January 2024].
Burgun, A., Botti, G., Fieschi, M. and Le Beux, P., 1999. Sharing knowledge in medicine: semantic and ontologic facets of medical concepts. IEEE SMC’99 Conference Proceedings. 1999 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (Cat. No.99CH37028). Vol. 6. Tokyo, Japan: IEEE, pp.300–305. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSMC.1999.816568.
Dijkstra, E.W., 1979. The Humble Programmer. Turing Award Lecture. In: E. Yourdon, ed. Classics in Software Engineering. New York, N.Y: Yourdon Press, pp.113–128. Available at: <http://archive.org/details/classicsinsoftwa00your> [visited on 31 January 2024].
Fiddaman, M. and Rodriguez-Pereyra, G., 2018. The razor and the laser. Analytic Philosophy, 59(3), pp.341–358. https://doi.org/10.1111/phib.12128.
Floyd, R.W., 1967. Assigning meanings to programs. Proceedings of Symposium on Applied Mathematics, 19, pp.19–32. Available at: <http://laser.cs.umass.edu/courses/cs521-621.Spr06/papers/Floyd.pdf>.
Gelernter, D.H., 1998. Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology. New York: Basic Books. Available at: <http://archive.org/details/machinebeautyele00gele> [visited on 31 January 2024].
Grenon, P., 2008. A Primer on Knowledge Representation and Ontological Engineering. In: K. Munn and B. Smith, eds. Applied Ontology. Frankfurt am Main: Ontos Verlag, pp.57–82. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110324860.57.
Gruber, T.R., 1993. A translation approach to portable ontology specifications. Knowledge Acquisition, 5(2), pp.199–220. https://doi.org/10.1006/knac.1993.1008.
Gruber, T., 2009. Ontology. In: L. Liu and M.T. Özsu, eds. Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Boston, MA: Springer US, pp.1963–1965. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1318.
Guarino, N., 1998. Formal Ontologies and Information Systems. In: N. Guarino, ed. Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Proceedings of FOIS’98, Trento, Italy, 6-8 June 1998. Amsterdam: IOS Press, 3–15.
Guarino, N. and Giaretta, P., 1995. Ontologies and Knowledge Bases: Towards a Terminological Clarification. In: N.J.I. Mars, ed. Towards Very Large Knowledge Bases: Knowledge Building and Knowledge Sharing. Amsterdam: IOS Press, pp.25–32.
Hill, R.K., 2018. Elegance in Software. In: L. De Mol and G. Primiero, eds. Reflections on Programming Systems. Vol. 133, Philosophical Studies Series. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp.273–286. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97226-8_10.
Jaziri, W. and Gargouri, F., 2010. Ontology Theory, Management and Design: An Overview and Future Directions. In: W. Jaziri and F. Gargouri, eds. Ontology Theory, Management and Design: Advanced Tools and Models. IGI Global, pp.27–77. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-61520-859-3.ch002.
Krzanowski, R. and Polak, P., 2022. The meta-ontology of AI systems with human-level intelligence. Philosophical Problems in Science (Zagadnienia Filozoficzne w Nauce), (73), pp.199–232.
Lando, G., 2010. Ontologia. Un’introduzione. Rome: Carocci.
Laurini, R., 2017. Geographic Knowledge Infrastructure: Applications to Territorial Intelligence and Smart Cities. London: ISTE Press - Elsevier.
Lewis, D., 1973. Counterfactuals. 1st ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Motara, Y.M. and Van Der Schyff, K., 2019. A functional ontology for information systems. South African Computer Journal, 31(2). https://doi.org/10.18489/sacj.v31i2.691.
Neches, R. et al., 1991. Enabling technology for knowledge sharing. AI Magazine, 12(3), pp.36–36. https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v12i3.902.
Noy, N.F. and McGuinness, D.L., 2003. Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology. (technical report). Stanford, CA: Stanford University. Available at: <http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/KSL_Abstracts/KSL-01-05.html> [visited on 1 February 2024].
Oram, A. and Wilson, G., eds., 2007. Beautiful code. 1st ed, Theory in practice series. Beijing; Sebastapol, Calif: O’Reilly.
Parsons, G., 2015. The Philosophy of Design. Cambridge: Polity press.
Partridge, C. et al., 2020. A Survey of Top-Level Ontologies - to inform the ontological choices for a Foundation Data Model. (technical report). CDBB. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.58311.
Pawson, J., 1998. Minimum. London: Phaidon Press.
Schaffer, J., 2015. What not to multiply without necessity. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 93(4), pp.644–664. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2014.992447.
Smith, B., 2004. Ontology. In: L. Floridi, ed. The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information. 1st ed, Blackwell philosophy guides, 14. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, pp.155–166.
Sober, E., 1975. Simplicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198244073.001.0001.
Sober, E., 2002. What is the Problem of Simplicity? In: A. Zellner, H.A. Keuzenkamp and M. McAleer, eds. Simplicity, Inference, and Modelling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.13–32.
Sowa, J.F., 2005. Guided Tour of Ontology. Available at: <http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/guided.htm> [visited on 29 January 2024].
Studer, R., Benjamins, V.R. and Fensel, D., 1998. Knowledge engineering: Principles and methods. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 25(1), pp.161–197. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-023X(97)00056-6.
Swartout, B., Patil, R., Knight, K. and Russ, T., 1997. Toward Distributed Use of Large-Scale Ontologies. AAAI Symposium on Ontological Engineering. Stanford, CA, pp.138–148.
Tambassi, T., 2021. The Philosophy of Geo-Ontologies: Applied Ontology of Geography, SpringerBriefs in Geography. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78145-3.
Tambassi, T. and Magro, D., 2015. Ontologie informatiche della geografia. Una sistematizzazione del dibattito contemporaneo. Rivista di Estetica, (58), pp.191–205. https://doi.org/10.4000/estetica.447.
Turner, R., 2018. Computational Artifacts: Towards a Philosophy of Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-55565-1.
Uschold, M., Box, P.O. and Usa, W., 1999. A Framework for Understanding and Classifying Ontology Applications. Proceedings of the IJCAI99 Workshop on Ontologies and Problem-Solving Method. Stockholm.
Van Inwagen, P., 2001. Ontology, identity, and modality: essays in metaphysics, Cambridge studies in Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wirth, N., 1974. On the Design of Programming Languages. Proc. IFICP Congress 74, pp.386–393. Available at: <https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~bchandra/courses/papers/Wirth_Design.pdf> [visited on 1 February 2024].
Yao, L. et al., 2011. Benchmarking ontologies: Bigger or better? PLoS Computational Biology, 7(1), e1001055. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1001055.