SUO: Re: Building, Sharing, and Merging Ontologies
John F. Sowa wrote:
>
> I wrote a tutorial with the above title, which can be found at
>
> http://www.bestweb.net/~sowa/ontology/ontoshar.htm
>
> Following is the abstract.
>
> John Sowa
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Building, Sharing, and Merging Ontologies
>
> John F. Sowa
>
> Abstract. For centuries, philosophers have sought universal categories
> for classifying everything that exists, lexicographers have sought
> universal terminologies for defining everything that can be said, and
> librarians have sought universal headings for storing and retrieving
> everything that has been written. During the 1970s, the ANSI SPARC
> committee proposed the three-schema architecture for defining and
> integrating the database systems that manage the world economy. Today,
> the semantic web has enlarged the task to the level of classifying,
> labeling, defining, finding, integrating, and using everything on the
> World Wide Web, which is rapidly becoming the universal repository
> for all the accumulated knowledge, information, data, and garbage of
> humankind. This talk surveys the issues involved, the approaches that
> have been successfully applied to small systems, and the ongoing efforts
> to extend them to distributed, interconnected, rapidly growing,
> heterogeneous systems.
>
> Contents:
>
> * 1. What is Ontology?
> * 2. Some Modern Systems
> * 3. Trees, Lattices, and Other Hierarchies
> * 4. Notations for Logic
> * 5. Ontology Sharing and Merging
> * 6. Glossary
> * References
>
> This paper consists of excerpts from previously published articles by
> John F. Sowa, updated with new material about ongoing projects on
> ontology and their implications for databases, knowledge bases, and the
> semantic web. For more background on these and related topics, see the
> book Knowledge Representation.
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John,
Just an aside on my first scan of this tutorial piece.
You may wish to note, though we have no extant record
of whether Plato drew the figure for it, that there
is an approximately binary tree of roughly depth 10
implied in the dialogue of the 'Sophist'. It's been
a while, but I did draw the figure of it once and even
loaded it into my tree-processing program many years ago,
anyway, as I recall there are some ternary divisions and,
of course, many of the terminal leaves are identified or
quotient out in the hypostasis of the Sophist himself,
but that is the gist of it.
Jon Awbrey
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