RE: SUO: a silly question about the new modular architecture
Dear John,
I agree.
Matthew West
Principal Consultant
Shell Information Technology International Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Other Tel: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.r.west@is.shell.com
Internet: http://www.shell.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John F. Sowa [mailto:sowa@bestweb.net]
> Sent: 03 September 2001 18:30
> To: West, Matthew R SITI-GREA-UK; standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org;
> phayes@ai.uwf.edu
> Subject: Re: SUO: a silly question about the new modular architecture
>
>
> Adam and Matthew,
>
> This is just one more reason why I believe the modular architecture
> is important:
>
> "West, Matthew R SITI-GREA-UK" wrote:
>
> > Conceptually I think there is no difference between
> > having two standardised concepts/axiom sets
> > and choosing between them and
> > one standardised one and one non standardised one
> > and choosing to use the non-standardised one.
> >
> > There is a formal (standards) difference, but I expect
> > most extensions/changes to SUO to come about initially
> > in this way, and it seems healthy to me provided the
> > limits of what is standardised are known.
>
> As many of the recent discussions on SUO list have shown, some parts
> of SUMO are fairly stable and noncontroversial (e.g., nobody seems
> to argue about the axioms for well-understood mathematical theories).
> But other topics, such as organizations, raise enormous numbers of
> divergent opinions.
>
> That is why I believe it is impossible to certify a monolitic
> ontology as a single "standard". Instead, it is more appropriate
> to certify a framework for presenting a modular collection of
> theories, each of which has its own certification procedure.
>
> It is very common in standards circles to provide a "registry" for
> various kinds of specifications, which may have different levels
> of certification. But I believe that a lattice-based or IFF-based
> framework has an important advantage over traditional registries:
> it provides a method for combining ontologies to generate new
> combinations of the modules upon request.
>
> Each module in the framework could have its own level of
> certification. Some of them would be much more dependable than
> others, and users could be told which ones have been tested, by
> whom, and to what level of certification.
>
> John Sowa
>