Re: SUO: OpenCyc as SUO starter document
On 3/1/02 20:42, "Christopher A. Welty" <weltyc@cs.vassar.edu> wrote:
> At 4:04 PM -0600 3/1/02, Bill Andersen wrote:
>> With respect to monolithicity, could some of those (Leo, John) explain
>> exactly what you mean by it? The OntoClean stuff of Guarino & Welty, for
>> example, can certainly be considered monolithic in some sense. Now, Doug
>> McDavid told me it is not these kind of distinctions he's worried about when
>> he complained about "monolithic" approaches but rather middle-level entities
>> like "Organization". That makes sense to me - I think it will be hard to
>> legislate such things, unless there is a context mechanism built-in as Leo
>> suggests.
>
> I have a tendency to do this, inherited down a chain of academics,
> but below is the dictionary definition of monolithic. I tend to
> think of meaning 1a, ie a single HUGE or MASSIVE entity. In that
> sense, OntoClean is absolutely not intended to be monolithic, quite
> the opposite in fact.
Right, Chris...
Some random ramblings...
Some of the conversations about this have been conflating "monolithic" and
"legislated". As Leo correctly pointed out, some kind of context mechanism
could be used to separate out different points of view. Some glue of course
is required to hold these different points of view together, and that part
would (must) be both monolithic and legislated, at least to the extent that
parties interested in building different "point-of-view" ontologies are also
interested in playing together.
However, some simple context mechanism (e.g., simple inclusion of theories)
would not be sufficient, since to be useful, there should be some means of
bridging the different points of view. Cyc's microtheory mechanism (to the
extent I still understand it), based on the McCarthy-Buvac context work, is
one way to do this. I'm no expert, but I'm sure there are others.
Bottom line is that users of the "ontology" would have to buy into some
parts, among which would be your and Nicola's axioms plus the context
system, plus whatever else proves to be needed.
This is one of the reasons I'm not to thrilled with attempts to flesh out
middle-level categories, a la SUMO. I think it's premature to do this right
now. Of course there is great pressure to do this, since the various
"ontology-lite" communities are busy building content while we're worrying
about identity, unity, contexts, and so on.
.bill