Ontology in Engineering

On Monday I attended a seminar on Ontology in Engineering at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London.

Ontology is a discipline in philosophy that seeks to understand the relationships between categories of existence.

The aim of the seminar was to raise awareness of the discipline amongst engineers and the use of the tool in engineering. Three philosophers gave talks on ontology. The first, Peter Simons talked about how Ontology has evolved from Plato and how it can be used to create relationships between totally different databases by creating a strong understanding of the underlying similarities between apparently unsimilar databases. He worked on a complex defence bill of materials project linking planes with hundreds of thousands of components.

The next, Hasok Chang of UCL talked about his book on boiling. The book describes how we all understand that water "boils" at 100 degs C but how this has not always been the perception and that depending on how an experiment is carried out "boiling" can appear to occur at different temperatures. The point was that we assume we understand what "boiling" is but when we actually ask people to define the category we get different answers. I learned that we need to sometimes rethink the categories we take for granted. Hasok also argued that the knowledge of engineers might be fundamentally different from that held by scientists. An interesting concept that turns the "engineering = science + problems" concept. Us, engineers need to be more confident about the unique nature of what we do.

The last speaker Luciano Floridi, a researcher at Oxford University spoke about Constructionism and how there are three actors who know any product, the User, the Maker and the Imitator. He explained how historically the User was the person who best understood the product and the Maker had limited knowledge. This has lead to the User being the person with the best knowledge of the product. He believes that the process is not that simple, that the Maker and the Imitator can have intimate knowledge of the product.

One thing that struck me was that with modern technologies, the same person can be User, Maker and Imitator. If you interact in the blogverse for example, you can be all of these people at once. This is very empowering and a great source of innovation and can lead to an enrichment of the human experience.

This was an interesting and thought provoking seminar that should hopefully lead to additional work to raise the profile of this kind of thinking more widely in engineering. Hopefully more philosophers will take an interest in engineering.