Directions for SUO: monolithicity and Cyc
I'm afraid that I have been unable to get to any SUO mail lately, but
I did have a peek at this message from Nicola - promoting a non-monolithic
approach which emphasizes understanding and relating ontologies, rather than
agreeing on a single one.
If it turns out that this is agreed by a everyone, this could have a major
shift in our emphasis and activity.
There is another possibly very important development which I believe we should
take into consideration. Doug Lenat recently announced that they will be
giving away Cyc. There will be a new organization called OpenCyc.org which will
oversee this. They are not going to give it all away at once, because they
need to have a viable business. Instead, they will give away different pieces
with varying amounts of detail. Every quarter, more will be released. The
first release is scheduled for July 2001. They are trying to get the balance
right between giving it away soon enough so that noone is motivated to build
their own. It is the only game in town. They do not want to give stuff away so
soon, that every company who might do business with Cyc will just wait, rather
than pay for early access. This way, Cyc will defacto be the worlds standard
UO and common sense Knowledge Base. They are using the Linux model for open
software, as their main starting point - adapting only insofar as there are
important differences between software and a KB.
How does this affect the SUO effort? For those that advocate a non-monolithic
approach, it Cyc will merely become one of those that need to be available, and
related to other ontologies. For those advocating a monolithic one single SUO,
it can have much greater import.
From time to time, people have said, why do we need another UO, when we already
have Cyc. Well, Cyc existed, but it was not really avaliable. This was an
excellent reason, to continue to pursue SUO. However, now that it WILL be
available, a very loooooong time before this group is likely to come up with a
viable alternative, it raises the question in a new light: Why build another
SUO if we have Cyc?
I belive that before much more energy goes into building our SUO, 'we' should
instead do a systematic and thorough investigation of CYC, and answer the above
question. The answer might be, there is no reason to build another
UO. Alternatively, it should take the form of a thorough critique of Cyc
indicating the shortcomings, and why it is insufficient (if it is) and how it
needs to be augmented or replaced by a 'real' SUO..
An alternative thread of activity can be as Nicola recommends, to spend time
relating alternatives, and work towards a library of reference ontologies, one
of which will be Cyc.
Mike Uschold
PS PLEASE include me explicitly on any responses on this topic to ensure that I
will look at it promptly. Otherwise it will may remain unopened along with a
sea of other SUO messages.