SUO: How does OpenCyc fit with SUO Scope and Purpose?
SUO WG,
As we await the release of OpenCyc (which will prompt a motion to
introduce it as a starter document), I'm going to try to seed some
discussions.
Question: How does OpenCyc fit with the SUO Scope and Purpose?
Background: A starter document (more often called a base document)
does not have to perfectly line up with a group's Scope and Purpose (S&P).
The S&P could be changed, or a new Project Authorization Request (PAR)
(which includes the S&P) could be submitted.
The SUO S&P is inserted below.
Jim Schoening
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IEEE P1600.1 Standard Upper Ontology Working Group
Scope & Purpose
Scope of Proposed Project:
(The Scope describes what is being done, including the technical boundaries
of the project.)
This standard will specify an upper ontology that will enable computers to
utilize it for applications such as data interoperability, information
search and retrieval, automated inferencing, and natural language
processing. An ontology is similar to a dictionary or glossary, but with
greater detail and structure that enables computers to process its content.
An ontology consists of a set of concepts, axioms, and relationships that
describe a domain of interest. An upper ontology is limited to concepts that
are meta, generic, abstract and philosophical, and therefore are general
enough to address (at a high level) a broad range of domain areas. Concepts
specific to given domains will not be included; however, this standard will
provide a structure and a set of general concepts upon which domain
ontologies (e.g. medical, financial, engineering, etc.) could be
constructed.
Purpose of Proposed Project:
A. AUTOMATED REASONING: The standard will be suitable for automated logical
inference to support knowledge-based reasoning applications.
B. INTER-OPERABILITY: The standard will provide a basis for achieving
Inter-Operability among various software and database applications.
1) Application developers can define new data elements in terms of a common
ontology, and thereby gain some degree of interoperability with other
conformant systems.
2) Applications based on domain-specific ontologies that are compliant with
this standard will be able to interoperate (to some degree) by virtue of the
shared common terms and definitions.
3) The SUO will play the role of a neutral interchange format whereby owners
of existing applications will be able to map existing data elements just
once to a common ontology. This provides a degree of interoperability with
other applications whose representations conform to SUO. This entails the
SUO being able to be mapped to more restricted forms such as XML, database
schema, or object oriented schema.
C: APPLICATION AREAS
1) E-commerce applications from different domains that need to interoperate
at both the data and semantic levels.
2) Educational applications in which students learn concepts and
relationships directly from, or expressed in terms of, a common ontology.
This will also enable a standard record of learning to be kept.
3) Natural language understanding tasks in which a knowledge-based reasoning
system uses the ontology to disambiguate among likely interpretations of
natural language statements.