Thinking about the "Curse of Knowledge"

I was reading some old blog posts from Semantic Focus, and ran across one that was good food for thought - The Curse of Knowledge and the Semantic Web. Although I do not agree with everything in the article, it highlighted some important topics.

The premise is that experts include everything and the kitchen sink in an ontology (because they know so much about it) and use technology-specific language (which means little to people outside the domain of expertise). So, there ends up being a mapping problem between experts and lay people, and therefore between computers programmed (by people) to search for certain information.

On the importance (or curse) of mapping, I totally agree. However, the issue that peaks my interest is not the mapping between lay people and domain experts, as much as the mapping between perspectives of different groups in a business. These perspectives are what define the groups' vocabularies and ontologies. There is no single, "right" perspective - and there is a huge need to map and align the perspectives - to allow the unimpeded flow of information between groups, and to correct inconsistencies.

That is why I advocate mapping to an upper ontology. Upper ontologies capture general and reusable terms and definitions (for more information, see my earlier post). They should not restrict a mapping to a certain perspective, but allow all the perspectives to be aligned. (That is also why you may need more than one.) There will certainly be subsets and supersets of information, as well as information in only one perspective. That is to be expected. However, the relationships should be known, mappable and should NOT conflict.

Getting back to the article, it does highlight a few things to help with the "curse of knowledge":

• Focus on the intent of the ontology, instead of the details (However, I think that you need both.)
  
• Define small, focused ontologies, each with a single intent and extensions for details
  
• Determine the core concept(s) and label them

I must add that the article also comments that experts have a problem explaining their domain to non-experts - because they know so much about the topic. With this, I disagree. An expert is one who can explain the core concepts of a domain simply. They can abstract the details to get at the essence of the topic, and yet, they can go "deep" to explain or advance the domain. Someone who simply knows some of the domain and can use the terminology (but not explain it) is not an expert - at least in my "vocabulary".