Re: SUO: Latest Revised Scope & Purpose
Jim,
Looks good to me.
Adam
At 06:44 PM 10/4/2000 -0400, Schoening, James R CECOM DCSC4I wrote:
>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.
>
>============================================
>The following is the prior version of the Purpose:
>
>Purpose: (Why the standard needs to be developed and who will benefit.)
>
> a. The standard will be suitable for automated logical inference to
>support knowledge-based reasoning applications.
>
> b. Since this ontology could be mapped to more restricted forms such
>as XML, database schema, or object oriented schema, this will enable
>developers of databases and other software applications to define new data
>elements in terms of a common ontology, and thereby gain some degree of
>interoperability with other conformant systems.
>
> c. 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 conform to SUO.
>
> d. 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.
>
> e. Applications of the ontology will include:
>
> 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.
>
>
-----------------
Adam Pease
Teknowledge
(650) 424-0500 x571