On 3/2/06, Gregg Wonderly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hmm, are you sure you're referring to ontologies, and not just semantically rich abstraction layers? In ontologies you specify the realtionships between things and what they are far beyond simple structures and inheritance models.
With this as everything else; it depends. We can go back to the previous example ;
1. buyFoodCheese() ;
vs.
2. buyFood ( 'cheese' ) ;
With 1, if you're a business that deals in cheese but now wants to offer pork, you need to extend and version that interface. With 2 you replace 'cheese' with 'pork' and in ontolgoy theory, everything should Just Work (TM).
Of course, reality is somewhat different but it gives you the advantage of dealing with the semantics of your 'types' (if you like) in a cleaner way, meaning your interface syntax and semantics don't change when your data semantics does. In some areas this is very valuable, for example in applications that constantly deal with new things; the ontology is governed by an external trusted party. Anne was talking about WS-CDL which seems to be a lever for this.
No, but I do work in an area where there are no good business opertunities and hence we have to do this ourselves since no one sees any moneies in it. :) For some general things there are no problems, but in some specific critical areas of our business, we have to come up with pretty specific semantics. I don't want my interfaces to handle those semantics; I want a more general ontology level to deal with the relationships leaving me to worry about the business aspects of it (basically, what we need to do with those relationships).
There are many standard ontological layers that already exist.
Some are part of programming language platforms such as the Java serialization implementation. There's the whole CORBA layer, that's implemented by libraries available for lots of languages. There's SOAP (cleans the crud off of a lot of things they tell me :-). There' s
lots of choices.
Hmm, are you sure you're referring to ontologies, and not just semantically rich abstraction layers? In ontologies you specify the realtionships between things and what they are far beyond simple structures and inheritance models.
What features are you finding missing that you think make a generic interface better?
With this as everything else; it depends. We can go back to the previous example ;
1. buyFoodCheese() ;
vs.
2. buyFood ( 'cheese' ) ;
With 1, if you're a business that deals in cheese but now wants to offer pork, you need to extend and version that interface. With 2 you replace 'cheese' with 'pork' and in ontolgoy theory, everything should Just Work (TM).
Of course, reality is somewhat different but it gives you the advantage of dealing with the semantics of your 'types' (if you like) in a cleaner way, meaning your interface syntax and semantics don't change when your data semantics does. In some areas this is very valuable, for example in applications that constantly deal with new things; the ontology is governed by an external trusted party. Anne was talking about WS-CDL which seems to be a lever for this.
Are you using a language or platform that requires so much low level detail
manipulation that you have resorted to doing all the work because nothing useful is done for you?
No, but I do work in an area where there are no good business opertunities and hence we have to do this ourselves since no one sees any moneies in it. :) For some general things there are no problems, but in some specific critical areas of our business, we have to come up with pretty specific semantics. I don't want my interfaces to handle those semantics; I want a more general ontology level to deal with the relationships leaving me to worry about the business aspects of it (basically, what we need to do with those relationships).
Maybe you can talk about the specific features of your implemenation which are addressed by other invocation layer implementations?
At this stage I'm not even quite sure of what you're talking about :) but based on my assumption that I do and from what I think you're saying, you already have ontology layers in place with a 80/20 interface? And that would be fine, but I'm not mapping from db to db, I'm already working in a Topic Maps environment where ontologies are a big part of data modelling, and I want to create interfaces that has a separation of data and the semantics.
But hey, maybe what I'm doing is to far from general business reality that it doesn't really apply here. :0)
Alex
--
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
- Frank Herbert
__ http://shelter.nu/ __________________________________________________
SPONSORED LINKS
| Computer software | Computer aided design software | Computer job |
| Soa | Service-oriented architecture |
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
- Visit your group "service-orientated-architecture" on the web.
- To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
