Re: SUO: Question
John,
Good suggestions. As an aside, the IFF folks have been considering
something along these lines, i.e., perhaps developing examples of SUMO
and OpenCyc in the IFF framework. It's early in our discussions, but
help along these lines (and the lines you suggest) would definitely be
worthwhile to the group and to us.
Thanks,
Leo
"John F. Sowa" wrote:
>
> Bill, Adam, Pierluigi, et al.,
>
> Several things have happened recently, of which the biggest was
> the very large gift of OpenCyc, which has been dropped into the mix.
> This raises the very serious question of what to do with or about it,
> and how it relates to the other work that has been going on for the
> past two years.
>
> I have been talking about the lattice of all possible theories, and
> some people, especially the IFF developers, have said that their
> system will support it. However, the IFF documentation still remains
> rather impenetrable to most ordinary citizens, and the question of
> how IFF would relate to SUMO, OpenCyc, and all the other available
> ontological resources has never been spelled out in detail (other
> than, of course, the very detailed mathematical details of IFF).
>
> Suggestion: I propose that we start a new project that will take
> a good hard look at the available resources and determine how they
> relate to one another. I have made a long-standing claim that they
> could be analyzed into neat little modules that could be fit into
> a lattice of theories. But that claim requires quite a bit of work
> to substantiate in detail:
>
> 1. A specification of the lattice operators that would relate the
> modules to one another. That would also require some tutorial
> documentation about what a lattice is and why it is an appropriate
> mathematical structure for relating theories.
>
> 2. A comparison of selected modules from SUMO, OpenCyc, and other
> resources with an analysis of the similarities and differences
> in their axiomatizations of the same or similar topics. If all
> the axioms are identical (which is highly unlikely), then there
> would be nothing further to do in order to relate SUMO to OpenCyc.
> But if they are different, then there are many questions that
> would have to be answered about why, how, and whether they are
> actually different in their implications or merely in the choice
> of which propositions to take as axioms and which are to be proved
> as theorems.
>
> 3. For modules that differ in SUMO and OpenCyc, it would be useful
> to show how they could be related by means of the lattice. For
> example, what is their common generalization (supremum)? What
> is their common specialization (infimum)? Is the infimum consistent
> or does it degenerate to the absurd (i.e., contradictory) theory
> at the bottom of the lattice.
>
> 4. When SUMO and OpenCyc are broken down into modules, it then becomes
> possible to evaluate them individually for consistency and other
> properties. Ian, for example, said that much of SUMO was developed
> by putting together modules taken from other resources. What are
> those other resources? How well were they tested, documented, or
> maintained? Can we begin to specify what kind of metalelvel
> information should be kept with each module, such as author(s),
> revision history, cerification, validation, etc.?
>
> 5. Many people on this list have worked with Cyc, and some, such as
> Bill Andersen, have participated in a major effort in analyzing
> the structure of the Cyc hierarchy and writing programs that can
> automatically extract axioms from it. Perhaps Bill and his
> colleagues could help us with some of the analysis of both OpenCyc
> and SUMO or at least give us some pointers on how to do it, what
> were some of the problems and issues, and what should we consider
> as criteria for success.
>
> There is a lot more that would have to be done in order to develop what
> I would consider an adequate basis for an ontology standard. Since I
> have been doing the most talking about lattices, I am willing to begin
> by putting together some documentation as a contribution to point #1
> above. I already have a lot of that material in various places on my
> web site, and I could assemble it into an HTML document that could serve
> as a tutorial and reference for the work on organizing modules.
>
> Points #2, #3, and #4 could best be done by people who have already
> done quite a bit of work with and on the SUMO and CYC systems. Other
> people, such as the IFF developers and I, could help them by analyzing
> the material they select and answering questions about how it could
> fit into a lattice.
>
> This proposal will take quite a bit of work, but it has many different
> subparts, which could be done by people with different expertise.
>
> John Sowa
--
_____________________________________________
Dr. Leo Obrst The MITRE Corporation
mailto:lobrst@mitre.org Intelligent Information Management/Exploitation
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