SUO: Papers submitted to the IJCAI SUO workshop
A few weeks ago we submitted a paper to the IJCAI SUO workshop,
entitled "Understanding Ontological Distinctions", retrievable from
http://www.ladseb.pd.cnr.it/infor/Ontology/Papers/IJCAI2001final.pdf
I don't know how many papers have been submitted; I think that they
should be made available to the SUO list, independently of any formal
review process.
I believe that contributions in the form of papers (which can evolve,
of course) are much more effective than long series of related
messages; personally, I would welcome less messages and more
documents. As I have suggested to James (and as has been proposed
many times by Matthew and Chris Partridge) we should maintain a
library of these documents, independently of any formal recognition
from the whole group.
Notice that our paper is not to be intended to be developed into the
final SUO standard, but just to help clarify some methodological
aspects and some general distinctions. It has been written in a
hurry, and probably there is too much stuff in; but I think it is
better than a series of scattered email messages.
Here is the paper's abstract:
The main goal of this paper is to present a systematic methodology
for selecting general ontological categories to be used for multiple
practical purposes. After a brief overview of our basic assumptions
concerning the way a useful top-level ontology should be linked to
language and cognition, we present a set of formal (i.e.,
domain-neutral) primitive relations that we believe play a
foundational role. On the basis of these relations we define a few
formal properties, which combined together help to understand and
clarify the nature of many common ontological distinctions.
All the best,
-- Nicola
---------------------------------
Nicola Guarino
National Research Council phone: +39 O49 8295751
LADSEB-CNR fax: +39 O49 8295763
Corso Stati Uniti, 4 email: Nicola.Guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it
I-35127 Padova
Italy
http://www.ladseb.pd.cnr.it/infor/ontology/ontology.html
(***updated 22/2/2001 ***)