SUO: RE: Latest Revised Scope & Purpose
All,
Jon Awbrey suggests we replace 'meta-' with 'metaconceptual.'
Jim Schoening
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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 metaconceptual,
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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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.