Re: SUO: Semantic interoperability
Leo,
Those issues that you discuss are, unfortunately, the real world,
and I don't believe that a well-designed, consistent, SUMO, IFF, Cyc,
or any such ontology, will make them go away:
LO>..... Unfortunately, mostly
> what one must map to are very ill-defined taxonomies and classification
> systems, and here I assume it is a mapping to a well-defined set of
> "reference ontologies" as we did, just so you can try to make reasonable
> inferences, have a baseline reasonable semantics. The semantics you
> "preserve" is sometimes very local, i.e., portions of the
> taxonomies/classification systems. Mostly everything is inconsistent and
> unsound, but yet one must map to these (different owners, different
> standards, etc.), preserving what one can....
> A point I make is that most of the declarative and procedural reasoning
> "engines"/applications in the world are unsound and inconsistent and yet
> are probably useful for their local targeted reasoning, and will
> probably have to be used for some time.
I completely agree with that appraisal. The only thing that I seriously
doubt is that SUMO, IFF, Cyc, et al., are going to change them.
> If you are only concerned with
> mapping logically well-defined ontologies, it is much easier: do they
> have equivalent or overlapping (by how much?) formal models. There are
> other issues, but in any case, this latter situation is not what exists
> in the world now, by far. If one can wipe the slate clean and design
> logically well-defined ontologies (perhaps something we can do here at
> SUO) from the ground up, how much easier things would be.
I agree, but that is not going to happen. That is the whole point
of my knowledge soup (Chapter 6 of the KR book), and the paper I
wrote about signs, processes, and language games:
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.htm
Bottom line: If you can't fight 'em, learn to live with 'em.
John Sowa