SUO: Comment #8 'Upper?'
We have already been discussing what we mean by 'Upper' ontology, so let's
review the following comments and exxplore this some more.
(Chair's Note: If we can reach consensus, great, but if we can't, it will be
perfectly fine to not specify this in the Scope. Or, we could say something
watered down like, "may include terms that are abstract, generic,.....)
Robert E. Kent rekent@ontologos.org commented:
>A qualified YES. My preference would be for a less monolithic
>onto-structure, with ontologies connected by ontomorphisms (morphisms of
>ontologies) - a preliminary study, a very simple entified version, >occurs
in
>my ISKO6 paper at http://www.ontologos.org/Papers/ISKO6/ISKO6.pdf). This
>less monolithic onto-structure would consist of a top level ontologythat
>only defines the structure of ontologies, an improved version of the Cyc
>Kernel DB http://www.cyc.com/cycl.html#appendixa if you will, with many
>upper level building block ontologies just "below" it in an extension
>hierarchy. Then the "large (20,000+) general-purpose standard ontology of
>common concepts" could be assembled from the building blocks using
>structural summation and structural quotienting.
Chris Menzel commented:
>I am not certain that it will be feasible to expect that there will be a
>single upper ontology, except perhaps for a relatively few, very high
>level concepts. We might have to start building in modularity very >early
on.
Douglas McDavid/Boulder/IBM" <mcdavid@us.ibm.com> has recently stated:
>At some point we need to understand whether upper means
>generic, or whether upper means abstract, or whether upper means
>ubiquitous, or whether upper
>means meta, or just exactly what does "upper" mean?
Nicola Guarino <Nicola.Guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it> recently responded to
Douglas McDavid's statement above with:
>In my opinion, the meaning of "upper" we need for the SUO is the
>union of "meta" and "generic". That is, we need to include in the SUO
>all the meta stuff Douglas McDavid mentioned, plus a reasonable
>number of "generic" (or "general") concepts (a rough estimate of a
>couple of thousand is OK with me, as we discussed in the previous
>thread). With "generic" I mean here "common (and relevant) to
>multiple domains/applications". Of course this is a very generic
>definition of "generic"....
Mike Uschold mfu@redwood.rt.cs.boeing.com responded with:
>I think Doug has brought up something potentialy quite important. I.e.,
>What does 'upper' mean? Perhaps we could attempt to define this in our
>scope and purpose statement? There are differences between abstract >and
generic,
>for example, but there is also a relationship, in that more abstract
>things tend
>to be more generic. Generic is also measured in teh eyes of the >beholder.
A term
>that appears very very specific to some specialized domain, e.g. a
>partticular class
>of bacteria, or of springs may indeed be viewed as highly generic, from
>workers in
>those particular fields.
Once again, let's explore this a bit more, see if we can reach any
consensus, but if not, be vague enough so we can move on.
Jim Schoening