SUO: Foundations of ontology/White Paper thoughts
The following remark was contributed to this list 14 months ago, and may
still have some relevance
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2000 10:25:46 -0400 (EDT)
From: Josiah Lee Auspitz <lee@mnis.com>
To: "Thompson, John A" <John.Thompson@PSS.Boeing.com>
Cc: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org, onto-std@KSL.Stanford.EDU
Subject: Four further issues
I appreciate John Thompson's tactful effort to return the discussion to a
specific judgement about a specific computational artifact. However...
....there is an element in the formation of
the old standards work that is missing in the new. The previous effort,
constituted as an ANSI ad hoc committee under a more general committee
headed by Tony Saris, began by agreeing that there was a crucial
distinction to be drawn for an upper level ontology between a standard and
an exemplification of it. The standard in the case of an upper level
ontology was properly procedural: it would lay out the key topics-- a
quite extensive list of which was developed-- for specification of any
ontology, but would not address content. A second prong of the effort
would propose a linking of consensus upper level terms with other
artifacts in accordance with the standard and make the result freely
available for general use, along with an explanation of the design choices
made and the overall specifications they exemplified. If the "reference
ontology" were well formed it would become, as Wordnet had become in its
sphere, a de facto standard by virtue of shared use. Under Bob Spillers'
non-directive leadership and with an assist from IBM, whose advanced
technology work he headed at the Santa Teresa lab facility, and further
support from the Tschira Foundation in Germany (inspired by John Sowa's
initial work) considerable progress was made on both prongs of this
project, including work on algorithms for semi-automated alignment of
upper levels which had been designed for differing purposes.
The new IEEE effort, in an apparent effort to cut to the chase, skimps the
procedural dimension. To judge by the declaration of purpose, it hopes to
stipulate the syntactics and semantics (but not the pragmatics) of a
reference ontology, which it will call the standard. The narrowing of
focus to a business/engineering context under ieee may indeed permit
certain simplifications-- such as the elimination of natural language and
cross language artifacts like Wordnet and Penman and the Japnese EDS as
candiates for integration into the reference ontology. But the attempt to
stipulate the reference artifact (as opposed to the set of specifications
it exemplifies) as *the* standard strikes me as a step backward. It leaves
out the pragmatic dimension of specifying not merely the domain (a
semantic issue) but the purposes to which various sub-ontologies may be
put (search, decision support, knowledge discovery nad logical inference,
cross language work). On the syntactic level, it leaves out the
specification of varieties of ontological inheritance beyond those
embodied in the (first order logic?) artifact. And on the administrative
level, it envisages a stipulative approach to a standard that is more
appropriate to other areas. On the other hand, as the effort is open to
all (as some of the previous meetings were not), its development will
ultimately be influenced by the reasoned consensus of the participants.
If there is overwhelming agreement that the main methodological issues are
settled or irrelevant to the project as now envisaged, then the KSL list
could be reserved for "merely academic" discussion while the ieee list
could be the locus for implementation of a single standard. My view is
that it is premature to think that the methodological/procedural prong has
become obsolete.
* * *
Lee