Re: SUO: OpenCyc as SUO starter document
Jim et al.,
I believe that Cyc is probably the largest and most thoroughly tested
of all current knowledge-based systems. Although I haven't yet seen the
excerpt that will be distributed as OpenCyc, I believe that it should at
least rival and probably exceed the scope of SUMO, and it will certainly
have had a much longer history and depth of experience and testing than
SUMO. Therefore, OpenCyc should receive at least as much consideration
as a candidate for a base SUO document as SUMO.
However, as you know, I voted against adopting SUMO as a candidate
for a base document, and I expressed numerous reservations about the
desirability of adopting any single, monolithic ontology as a standard.
Those reservations would apply to OpenCyc as well as to SUMO.
Given all those reservations, I am very happy to see OpenCyc being
contributed to the SUO mix, since I believe that the time is ripe
for a re-evaluation of the status of the SUO effort and its future
directions. The availability of both OpenCyc and SUMO as proposed
contents and of IFF as a proposed framework raises many issues that
have not been addressed in the detail they deserve.
There is a great deal more to be said, but instead of trying to say
it all now, I will just summarize by saying that we should welcome
the submission of OpenCyc to the SUO effort and that we should also
take this opportunity to reconsider how OpenCyc will relate to the
other onging projects.
John Sowa