SUO: Comment #6 "Best Practices"
SUO,
Lee Auspitz voted to ABSTAIN, with this as one of his comments:
Lee Writes:
>There appears to be no provision to review best practices,
>whether settled or emerging, before putting issues to a
>vote. The matter of best practices is not covered in the
>statements of scope and purpose, an unusual lapse for a
>standards activity."
Chair's Response:
I don't believe this comment needs to be "resolved," because a plan for how
to develop a given standard does not belong in the Scope(what) and Purpose
(Why).
But this is still a valid comment. In the standards field, it goes without
saying that a standard should be based on what's called 'existing practice.'
Some standards bodies won't even approve a standards project unless there is
existing practice.
Jim Schoening
==============================================================
The original Scope and Purpose is as follows:
Scope of Proposed Project:
(The Scope describes what is being done, including the technical boundaries
of the project.)
This standard will specify the syntax and semantics of a general-purpose
upper level ontology. An ontology is a set of terms and formal definitions.
This will be limited to the upper level, which provides definition for
general-purpose terms and provides a structure for compliant lower level
domain ontologies. It is estimated to contain between 1000 and 2500 terms
plus roughly ten definitional statements for each term. It is intended to
provide the foundation for ontologies of much larger size and more specific
scope.
Purpose of Proposed Project:
(The Purpose describes why the standard needs to be developed and who will
benefit.)
* The standard will be suitable for automated logical inference to
support knowledge-based reasoning applications.
* This standard will enable the development of a large (20,000+)
general-purpose standard ontology of common concepts to be developed, which
will provide the basis for middle-level domain ontologies and lower-level
application ontologies.
* The ontology will be suitable for "compilation" to more restricted
forms such as XML or database schema. This will enable database developers
to define new data elements in terms of a common ontology, and thereby gain
some degree of interoperability with other compliant systems.
* Owners of existing systems will be able to map existing data
elements just once to a common ontology, and thereby gain a degree of
interoperability with other representations that are compliant with the SUO.
* Domain-specific ontologies which are compliant with the SUO will be
able to interoperate (to some degree) by virtue of the shared common terms
and definitions.
* Applications of the ontology will include:
* E-commerce applications from different domains which need to
interoperate at both the data and semantic levels.
* Educational applications in which students learn concepts and
relationships directly from, or expressed in terms of, a common ontology.
This will also enable a standard record of learning to be kept.
* Natural language understanding tasks in which a knowledge based
reasoning system uses the ontology to disambiguate among likely
interpretations of natural language statements.
===============