Re: SUO: ontology areas for review
John,
Your examples are well taken, but as anyone who has ever worked
with problems in linguistics knows, they only scratch the surface
of the innumerable thorny issues that could be raised. I also
like your concluding paragraph.
John Bateman wrote:
> Any construction in this area is going to be theory-laden: perhaps
> a further argument against the one-top-ontology-fits-all? Although
> I belong to the "nice it's there" camp rather than the "no use trying"
> one! [:-)]
Let me also emphasize that I belong to the "nice it's there" camp.
My paper on negotiation instead of legislation is not a protest
against building ontological resources, but against the idea that
any one of them (or even any collection of them) should be considered
an official standard. And it's more than a protest -- it's also my
proposal for how multiple resources (including legacy systems) can
be accommodated.
The term "theory laden" has been popular in linguistic circles,
since there have been many famous "linguistic wars" over theories
in the past 50 years. But that same term applies to any and every
field of science, engineering, business, and the arts -- and we
certainly don't want to exclude religion, which is famous for its
"religious wars".
This raises the question of what we can standardize if we are not
standardizing content. The answer is form: we should be focusing
on formal ways of organizing all the ontological resources that are
available, including SUMO, OpenCyc, IMPS, WordNet, EDR, etc.
IFF is an effort in that direction, but it has not been tested on
actual content and applications. Having at least two rich content
ontologies, such as OpenCyc and SUMO, should bring to the fore
the question of how they can be mixed, matched, and used together.
I would like to open up all the other sources of content for
consideration in this melange.
John Sowa