RE: SUO: RE: Cyc Upper Ontology offer
On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, Doug Lenat wrote:
> Graham,
>
> The intent is not for Cycorp to claim credit for Aristotle's work,
> but rather to avoid a situation where someone runs some simple
> mechanical transformation of our axioms, producing a set of
> equivalent ones for which they then take credit. (Normal
> copyright protection does not protect against such "semantic"
> plaigarism, since the character-by-character appearance of
> the axioms would be different from the form in which we supplied
> them, even if all the "adapter" did was alter the names of the
> predicates and variables in some systematic manner.)
>
> Since we aren't asking for royalties or license fees, I expect
> there shouldn't be much objection to giving us the requested
> citation/acknowledgement. I'm sure you would expect the same
> in the reverse situation: i.e., you've written a corpus of 30,000
> axioms and some fellow scientist asks you for a copy, and you
> supply it, and they then adapt and built upon it for their
> work (academic or commercial); then surely in that situation
> it would be wrong for them not to credit your contribution.
Doug, I don't think that Graham's remark questioned the moral and legal
obligation to give credit where credit is due, but rather concerned the
problems and possible complications involved in determining *when* such
credit is due, especially regarding the axiomatization of rather general
logical and ontological principles.
-chris
--
Christopher Menzel # web: philebus.tamu.edu/~cmenzel
Philosophy, Texas A&M University # net: chris.menzel@tamu.edu
College Station, TX 77843-4237 # vox: (979) 845-8764