SUO: questions about SUMO
Dear SUO Group Members,
I am browsing the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology with a great
interest, and I would like to ask some questions and post some
comments.
First I would like to ask what is the current status of SUMO. At the
SUMO page you say that its a "starter document", but it seems that
its already quite comprehensive and stable. Do you expect that the
final version will look like the current one, so that it makes sense
to start to build something on top of SUMO, or do you thing that the
final version will be completely different?
Next I would like to comment your design rationale at the end of the
document
http://ontology.teknowledge.com/rsigma/FormalSUOdraft.rtf
> In constructing the ontology we have tried to adhere to standards and
> guidelines that are widely embraced in the ontological community.
> Some general goals have been the following:
> Competence: How well does it support problem solving? That is, what
> questions can the representation answer or what tasks can it support?
I think that this is very important point. It would be nice to have
some benchmark queries that are of some practical utility, and that
are (or will be) within competence of SUMO. Do you have something
like this?
> Perspicuity: Is the representation easily understood by the users?
> Does the representation "document itself?"
Thats also an important issue. Since the output of your browser was
quite cryptic for me, I've written a prototype of my own browser,
which explicitly visualises relations as instance, subclass, domain,
range etc., and have a toy natural language explanator of axioms. I
think that the output of my browser is more readable for non KR-
expert users. If you like, have a look at
http://virtual.cvut.cz/cgi-bin/kifb
> Minimality: Does the representation contain the minimal set of terms
> needed to support the goals above?
I'm not sure if SUMO should be a formal upper ontology, or a common-
sense ontology. It looks more like the former, but then I don't
understand why it contains so specific concepts like War or
FruitOrVegetable. I think that those should be in another layer of
the ontology.
And finally let me mention some more specific comments:
1) I think that there is a buggy axiom in SUMO at line 7487:
(=>
(and
(instance ?COUNT Counting)
(agent ?COUNT ?AGENT)
(patient ?COUNT ?ENTITY))
(exists (?NUMBER)
(knows ?AGENT (equal (CardinalityFn ?ENTITY)))))
The equal relation has only one argument. Should it contain ?NUMBER
argument also?
2) It seems to me that the concept TimePoint should be somehow
related to the concept RealNumber, and part of TimePoint's axioms
should be stated for RealNumber, because they are valid for
RealNumbers too, and could be reused in other instantations of
RealNumbers such as TimePoint.
Thank you for your attention.
With best regards
Michal Sevcenko
----------------------------------------
Ing. Michal Sevcenko
Department of Computer Science
Faculty of Electrical Engineering
Czech Technical University in Prague
Tel +420 2 2435 3661
http://webis.felk.cvut.cz/en/people/sevcenm.html