Re: SUO: OpenCyc Released

["John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>]

I'm very pleased that OpenCyc has finally been released.  Now we can
discuss it seriously as an important resource for ontology instead
of a hypothetical possibility for the future.

That means we now have two large content resources, OpenCyc and
SUMO, and the IFF project, which addresses the mappings and
relationships among various resources.

I suggest that the most important task before us is to address
the following questions:

  1. How are the OpenCyc and SUMO ontologies related or relatable?

  2. Is it possible to merge, relate, or correlate them?  Should
     they be merged into a single larger ontology, or should they
     be organized in a library of modules that can be assembled
     in different ways for different purposes?

  3. How can they be used effectively together, by themselves, or
     in communications between them and with other systems that may
     use other ontologies (or no explicitly stated ontologies)?

  4. Does the IFF have the mechanisms in place for relating them?
     If so, what are they?  If not, how can they be added?

  5. What tasks should be undertaken to assess the resources that
     are now available, and how should we approach them?

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of questions, and
I'm sure that other subscribers to this list can think of many
more that should be considered.

John Sowa