Re: SUO: 21 May 2002 -- Unanswered Questions About SUMO Set Theory
Bill,
I agree with the spirit of your point about the how the wording of (3) in the statement of purpose has contributed to the divergence we're all noticing. But I want to revisit the question Todd raised, point blank. In particular, I think we should all pause for a moment and seriously consider the implications of having no consensus on the following:
(a) the goal of the SUO group is to develop the Ontology for the infrastructure of the "Semantic Web" (for those who don't like that explicit association, substitute "next-generation computational systems" or what have you)
(b) the goal of the SUO group is to develop the Infrastructure for the development of ontologies that will enable the Semantic Web.
My question is: if at this point no one can say whether the goal of the group is (a) or (b), how can we possibly expect there to be anything resembling a directed, concerted effort towards the "endgame" by the members of the group?
Erik
Bill Andersen <andersen@ontologyworks.com> wrote:
On 5/21/02 12:57, "Adam Pease" 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 repr!
esentations
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). 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.
.bill
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