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Adam Pease is the current IEEE SUO Working Group Technical Editor for SUMO, and maintains a SUMO page. The SUMO starter document was created at Teknowledge by Ian Niles and Adam Pease (the principal investigator), with a contribution by Chris Menzel. Teknowledge also maintains a SUMO page. The SUMO began as a synthesis of a wide range of publicly available formal content (please see a partial history of versions), and this synthesis was guided by feedback from the SUO Working Group. Please see the primary paper. The SUMO starter document was approved as a work item by Motion 2 of the group
The SUMO provides a foundation for middle-level and domain ontologies, and its purpose is to promote data interoperability, information retrieval, automated inference, and natural language processing. The SUMO consists of approximately 4,000 assertions (including over 800 rules) and 1,000 concepts. The SUMO is designed to be relatively small so that these assertions and concepts will be easy to understand and apply. Some of the general topics covered in the SUMO include:
- Structural concepts such as instance and subclass
- General types of objects and processes
- Abstractions including set theory, attributes, and relations
- Numbers and measures
- Temporal concepts, such as duration
- Parts and wholes
- Basic semiotic relations
- Agency and intentionality.
If you reference the SUMO, please include a link to the primary paper, from FOIS-2001.
Status and versions
The work of merging and synthesizing the original ontologies is complete. The Technical Editor solicits comments and suggestions for inclusion in new proposed versions. Proposed versions are only that--the starter document is replaced only by a vote of the full Working Group. There is a discussion group specifically for SUMO issues at suo-sumo@listserv.ieee.org.
The official version of the SUMO starter document is version
1.52, dated April 25, 2003.
The most recent proposed version is version 1.73.
Resources
Ontologyportal.org:
This site is a portal for the SUMO and SUMO-based ontologies.
You will find mappings
to all of WordNet, language
generation templates for Hindi, Chinese, Italian, German,
Czech and English, and tool
support for browsing and inference. Domain ontologies
which include the MId-Level
Ontology (MILO) , and ontologies of Communications,
Countries
and Regions, distributed
computing, Economy,
Finance,
engineering
components, Geography,
Government,
Military,
North
American Industrial Classification System, People,
physical
elements, Transnational
Issues, Transportation,
Viruses,
World
Airports..
Teknowledge:
Further papers on the SUMO and its use may be found on ontology.teknowledge.com.
These include a guide
to reading SUMO and related ontologies, and a summary
of SUMO contents. This site includes versions of the
SUMO exported from KIF (e.g., to OWL, Protege, etc), Teknowledge's
MId-Level Ontology (MILO),
and ontologies of
Communications,
Countries and Regions,
distributed computing,
Economy,
Finance,
engineering components,
Geography,
Government,
Military,
North American Industrial Classification System,
People,
physical elements,
TransnationalIssues,
Transportation,
Viruses,
World Airports,
we derived from the SUMO, and an
online browser
for the SUMO. To facilitate the use of the SUMO by information retrieval and natural language processing
systems, the concepts of the SUMO have been
mapped
to the WordNet synonym sets. Finally, you may request
a free copy of the Sigma knowledge engineering environment, a
tool for browsing, checking, and querying SUMO-based ontologies.
Bibliography
Ahrens, K, Chung S.F., and Huang C. 2003. Conceptual Metaphors: Ontology-based Representation and Corpora Driven Mapping Principles. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on the Lexicon and Figurative Language.
Andersen, W., and Peterson, B. 2001. An Ontology of Modern Military Organizations and their Structure. In Working Notes of the IJCAI-2001 Workshop on the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology, Seattle, Washington, August 6, 2001.
Chung, S. F., Ahrens, K., and Huang C. 2003. ECONOMY IS A PERSON: A Chinese-English Corpora and Ontological-based Comparison Using the Conceptual Mapping Model. In Proceedings of the 15th ROCLING Conference for the Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing, National Tsing-Hwa University, Taiwan.
Delgado, J., Gallego, I., Garcia, R., and Gil, R. 2002. An Ontology for Intellectual Property Rights: IPROnto. In Proceedings of the 1st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2002), Sardinia, Italy, June 9-12th, 2002.
Farrar, S., Lewis, W., and Langendoen, T. 2002. A Common Ontology for Linguistic Concepts. In Proceedings of the Knowledge Technologies Conference, Seattle, Washington, March 10-13, 2002.
Flater, D. 2003. SUMO2LOOM Documentation. National Institutes of Standards and Technology Report, January 9, 2003, WERB.
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Kuraoka, K., and Batres, R. 2003. An Ontological Approach to Represent HAZOP Information, Process Systems Engineering Laboratory, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Technical Report TR-2003-01.
Langendoen, T., Farrar, S., and Lewis, W. 2002. Bridging the Markup Gap: Smart Search Engines for Language Researchers. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Resources and Tools in Field Linguistics, prior to 3rd annual Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain, May 26-27, 2002.
Legrand, S., Tyrvainen, P., and Saarikoski, H. 2003. Bridging the Word Disambiguation Gap with the Help of OWL and Semantic Web Ontologies. Proceedings of EROLAN 2003, the Semantic Web and Language Technology, Bucharest, Romania, July 28 - August 8, 2003.
Lewis, W., Farrar, S., and Langendoen, T. 2001. Building a Knowledge Base of Morphosyntactic Terminology. In Proceedings of the IRCS Workshop on Linguistic Databases, December 11-13, 2001, S. Bird, P. Buneman, and M. Liberman, Eds.
Ludwig, B., Bucher, K., and Goerz, G. 2002. Corega Tabs: Mapping Semanatics onto Pragmatics. In Proceedings of the KI-2002 Workshop on Applications of Description Logics ADL'02, Aachen, Germany, September 16-20, 2002.
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Niles, I., and Pease, A. 2001. Origins of the Standard Upper Merged Ontology: A Proposal for the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology. In Working Notes of the IJCAI-2001 Workshop on the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology, Seattle, Washington, August 6, 2001.
Niles, I., and Pease, A. 2001. Towards a Standard Upper Ontology. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS-2001), Chris Welty and Barry Smith, eds, Ogunquit, Maine, October 17-19, 2001.
Pease, A. 2001. Evaluation of Intelligent Systems: The High Performance Knowledge Bases and IEEE Standard Upper Ontology Projects ( invited position paper). In Proceedings of the 2001 workshop on Measuring Intelligence and Performance Of Intelligent Systems (PERMIS 2001), September 4, 2001.
Pease, A., Niles, I., and Li, J. 2002. The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology: A Large Ontology for the Semantic Web and its Applications. In Working Notes of the AAAI-2002 Workshop on Ontologies and the Semantic Web, Edmonton, Canada, July 28-August 1, 2002.
Pease, A. and Niles, I. 2002. Practical Semiotics: A Formal Theory. In Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Information and Knowledge Engineering (IKE '02), Las Vegas, Nevada, June 24-27, 2002.
Pease, A., and Niles, I. 2002. IEEE Standard Upper Ontology: A Progress Report. Knowledge Engineering Review, Special Issue on Ontologies and Agents, 17, 65-70.
Phytila, C. 2002. An Analysis of the SUMO and Description in Unified Modeling Language, unpublished.
Pinto, S. 2001. Revising and Extending the Units of Measure "Subontology". In Working Notes of the IJCAI-2001 Workshop on the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology, Seattle, Washington, August 6, 2001.
Sevcenko, M. 2003. Online Presentation of an Upper Ontology. In Proceedings of Znalosti 2003, Ostrava, Czech Republic, February 19-21, 2003.
Subrata D., Shuster K., and Wu, C. 2002. Ontologies for Agent-Based Information Retrieval and Sequence Mining. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems (OAS02), held at the 1st International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Bologna, Italy, July 15-19, 2002.