Re: SUO: 21 May 2002 -- Unanswered Questions About SUMO Set Theory
At 01:47 PM 5/21/2002 -0500, Bill Andersen wrote:
>On 5/21/02 12:57, "Adam Pease" <apease@ks.teknowledge.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Todd,
> > There are different opinions on this list. When we wrote the PAR for
> > this group the intent was to have a standards effort aimed at ontology
> > content - creating a set of terms and formal definitions. A large number
> > of people who have joined this group are interested in a different
> > direction however.
> >
> > Adam
>
>Hi, Adam...
>
>Well, I think the reason that the direction has diverged is *because* of
>this text in the Statement of Purpose (which is equivalent to the PAR):
>
> 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.
>
>It seems to be recognized by many people who have chosen to join this group
>that SUMO, OpenCyc or any similar effort will not achieve (3).
That's an odd "recognition" since it flies in the face of at least
anecdotal evidence to the contrary. We've used both Cyc and SUMO to
integrate existing applications. The Cyc integration tasks are described in
Cohen, P., Schrag, R., Jones, E., Pease, A., Lin, A., Starr, B., Gunning,
D., and Burke, M. (1998), The DARPA High Performance Knowledge Bases
Project, AI Magazine, Vol. 19 No.4, Winter.
<http://projects.teknowledge.com/HPKB/Publications/AImag.pdf>
One might claim there's a better, or more efficient way to accomplish this,
but not that SUMO or Cyc can't successfully be used for this task.
> Such people
>participate out of a genuine interested in ontology. After all, this is
>really the only place where one can do that - certainly not the W3C venues.
>That explains the mystery of their presence.
>
>The reason you see them as going in a different direction is that they don't
>agree with your approach. BTW, IFF for that matter doesn't agree with the
>PAR. Should it be rejected out of hand as a candidate? I think not.
I think you may misunderstand the IEEE then. IEEE charters groups to
achieve their PARs. This is not just a discussion group. If someone has a
project they believe in and want to make it into a standards effort, they
should do so, possibly by chartering a new IEEE group with a new PAR. For
example, Jim Schoening was already involved in P1484, but didn't try to
push an ontology standard in that group since that wasn't the charter of
the group. Instead, he started a new group. Mike Gruninger didn't try to
standardize KIF in this group, he's submitted a new work item for ANSI.
This isn't about my approach or anyone else's. It's simply about following
a normal standards process.
Adam
> .bill
Adam Pease
Teknowledge
(650) 424-0500 x571