Re: SUO: questions about SUMO
Michal Sevcenko wrote, below: "In fact I think that
everything what holds for instances of RealNumber holds for instances
of TimePoint too."
But it probably doesn't make sense to multiply or divide one time point by
another?
Doug McDavid
Delivery Excellence Team
IBM Business Innovation Services
Member, IBM Academy of Technology
mcdavid@us.ibm.com -- 916-549-4600
"Imagine all the people ... living life in peace."
"Michal Sevcenko SITE" <sevcenko@vc.cvut.cz>@majordomo.ieee.org on
04/25/2002 02:04:48 AM
Please respond to "Michal Sevcenko SITE" <sevcenko@vc.cvut.cz>
Sent by: owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org
To: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
cc:
Subject: Re: SUO: questions about SUMO
Dear Adam,
Thanks for your reply. I'm very pleased that you like my browser.
Now let me reply to your comments:
> > > 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?
>
> We don't at the moment, but I agree it would be a good idea. On
> domain-specific projects we're doing that use SUMO, we do have
> question sets, but they aren't limited to the content of SUMO. We'd
> welcome suggestions for questions that we could include in some sort
> of test corpus for SUMO itself.
I don't have much experience with using ontologies for automatic
query answering, so I can hardly suggest some reasonable test suite.
But I am going to experiment with this in the near future. In fact, I
am a bit suspitious about the ability of SUMO to answer queries. It
seems to me that at this stage SUMO is more valuable for exchanging
knowledge between _people_, but I may be wrong (as I hope :). You
also mentioned that there are domain-specific projects built on SUMO
that have some practical test suites. Could you point me to some
publicly available information about them, please?
> Is it ok if we link to your site from
> http://ontology.teknowledge.com ? Are you planning to keep the site
> up to date as we release future versions of SUMO? Maybe we could even
> talk about sharing code and produce a combined version of our browsers
> that has "novice" and "advanced" versions of presentation.
Well, it would be an honour for me to have a link to my browser on
your page. I'm also willing to share the source code. The
virtual.cvut.cz site is quite stable, this is not a problem. But
there are some issues that need to be solved:
1) The program still have some bugs I'm aware of and lots of bugs I'm
not aware of, of course. It was written quite in a hurry. But I think
these bugs can be fixed soon.
2) The program relies on special semantic features that are used in
SUMO by convention, but are not standardized (such as subclass
relation is named 'subclass', and always have two arguments, etc.) So
the program works well with SUMO, but should be updated to be robust
for ontologies that do not conform to these conventions.
3) The program uses offline copy of sumo (merge.txt), so some
synchronization policy have to be established.
4) The file merge.txt has been manually split into several files
(according to comments in merge.txt), so that the browser can show to
which part of ontology belongs a displayed concept, as well as all
concepts in one part of the ontology. Later on I noticed that you
have a special version of merge.txt that have concepts wrapped into
some namespace predicates, so maybe I should exploit this in my
browser.
5) Maybe you can suggest what should I write at the title page of my
browser so that it will be formally correct.
> A TimePoint is not just a number, which is an abstract mathematical
> notion, but rather a specific point on the time line. TimePoint(s)
> can be specified with respect to a calendar using functions like
> SecondFn or YearFn. For example, SecondFn takes a RealNumber and a
> Minute and returns the number of second into that particular Minute.
Perhaps I did not express myself correctly. I understand that
TimePoint is more than a RealNumber. I wanted to say this:
1) TimePoint is similar to RealNumber. In fact I think that
everything what holds for instances of RealNumber holds for instances
of TimePoint too. I do not claim that TimePoint should be a subclass
of RealNumber (perhaps its not possible to crossover Abstract and
Physical thing), but maybe TimePoint could inherit RealNumber's
properties some other way.
2) Some axioms that say something about TimePoints holds for
RealNumbers too, and are therefore missing in axiomatization of
RealNumbers. For example, every TimePoint is greater or equal than
negative infinity, between two distinct TimePoints there exists other
distinct TimePoint, etc.
And finally, I would have another specific comment about SUMO
content. I thing that the documentation of overlapsTemporally
relation is somehow misleading:
> (overlapsTemporally ?interval1 ?interval2) means that the two
> TimeIntervals ?interval1 and ?interval2 have a TimeInterval in common.
> Note that this is consistent with ?interval1 and ?interval2 being the
> same TimeInterval.
It suggests that if we think the intervals as sets of TimePoints,
they have nonempty intersection. However, the axiomatization of this
relation:
> (<=>
> (overlapsTemporally ?INTERVAL1 ?INTERVAL2)
> (or
> (equal ?INTERVAL1 ?INTERVAL2)
> (during ?INTERVAL1 ?INTERVAL2)
> (starts ?INTERVAL1 ?INTERVAL2)
> (finishes ?INTERVAL1 ?INTERVAL2)))
says that ?INTERVAL1 is a subset of ?INTERVAL2 (in the set analogy),
which is indeed something different. Am I right?
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