SUO: RE: Latest Revised Scope & Purpose
Looks fine to me -- I say go with it.
Pat Cassidy
And big thanks to Jim for persisting patiently through
the process. And to Mike for improving the flow of the
language in the document.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> [mailto:owner-standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org]On Behalf Of Schoening,
> James R CECOM DCSC4I
> Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2000 6:45 PM
> To: Standard-Upper-Ontology (E-mail)
> Subject: SUO: Latest Revised Scope & Purpose
>
>
>
> All,
>
> Below is the latest proposed S&P, with the following changes:
>
> a. Graham Horn suggested that the word 'meta' be spelled 'meta-'
> since the former is only a prefix.
>
> b. Mike Uschold has rewritten the entire Purpose, which
> looks much
> improved while keeping all the concepts.
>
> I suggest we not do too much more tweaking. We've
> probably spend 50
> times more effort than normal for a S&P. But this is an open
> process, so
> all requests will be addressed.
>
> Jim Schoening
>
> =================================================
>
> SCOPE: (What is being done, including the technical boundaries of the
> project.)
>
> This standard will specify an upper ontology. An
> ontology consists
> of a set of concepts, axioms, and relationships that describe
> a domain of
> interest. An upper ontology is limited to concepts that are
> meta, generic,
> abstract and philosophical. The concepts in an upper ontology
> address all
> domains of interest. Each concept will have a specification
> of its meaning
> and a term to label it. The former consists of 1) a set of
> axioms expressed
> in a formal language that define the concept and its
> relationships with
> other concepts and 2) comments in natural language to aid human
> understanding. This ontology will include roughly several thousand
> concepts. It will provide a foundation for ontologies of much
> larger size
> and more specific scope, whose concepts can be defined, partially or
> completely, using concepts from the upper ontology.
>
> Purpose: (Why the standard needs to be developed and who will
> benefit.)
>
> A. AUTOMATED REASONING: The standard will be suitable for
> automated logical
> inference to
> support knowledge-based reasoning applications.
>
> B. INTER-OPERABILITY: The standard will provide a basis for achieving
> Inter-Operability among various software and database applications.
>
> 1) Application developers can define new data elements
> in terms of a
> common
> ontology, and thereby gain some degree of interoperability with other
> conformant systems.
>
> 2) Applications based on domain-specific ontologies that are
> compliant with this standard
> will be able to interoperate (to some degree) by virtue of
> the shared common
> terms and definitions.
>
> 3) The SUO will play the role of a neutral interchange format
> whereby owners of
> existing applications will be able to map existing data
> elements just once to a common ontology. This provides a degree of
> interoperability with other applications whose
> representations conform to
> SUO.
> This entails the SUO being able to be mapped to more
> restricted forms such
> as XML, database schema, or object oriented schema.
>
> C: APPLICATION AREAS
>
> 1) E-commerce applications from different domains that need
> to interoperate at both the data and semantic levels.
>
> 2) 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.
>
> 3) Natural language understanding tasks in which a knowledge
> based reasoning system uses the ontology to disambiguate among likely
> interpretations of natural language statements.
>
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