SUO: Re: Unanswered Questions About SUMO Set Theory
On 5/23/02 1:42, "John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net> wrote:
John, see comments below..
>> 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.
>
> I agree that content was and still is a central focus of the SUO
> project. However, there is a very serious question about the form
> in which that content is presented and made available. Another
> very serious issue is the recognition of multiple, often conflicting
> selections of content, which are required for various purposes.
I think your arguments about this are pretty hard to argue with. And you're
right - Adam does have a particular reading of the PAR. That said, I spoke
with Adam for a while about this and it has to be said that his reading *is*
consistent with the PAR.
> 3. Therefore, the SUO should adopt a framework that can accommodate
> all possible theories, show precisely how they are related to one
> another (as generalizations, specializations, or alternatives),
> state clearly what purpose(s) each one is intended to satisfy,
> and include a history of endorsements, certifications, and
> cautionary notes that various users have experienced.
Perhaps the group should do this, but Adam doesn't have to if he chooses not
to. It would have had to have been adopted up front as a goal, but wasn't.
> The IFF working group is developing such a framework, and I would
> be happy to support a collaboration of the SUMO and OpenCyc
> proponents to cast their collections within the IFF framework
> (perhaps with further developments and modifications of IFF
> that might be needed to accommodate them).
Now that sounds like a constructive proposal. I would be interested in
seeing if IFF can do this. That has been the claim, but it's pretty hard to
see it without an example. In fact, I would imagine that the SUMO and Cyc
crews would welcome such a move. If it could be shown to work, it would
only make their contributions more valuable than they otherwise would be.
> But I would never support either SUMO or OpenCyc by themselves
> as IEEE standards.
That's why we have votes, I guess...
> I also have some reservations about CycL
> as a proposed standard. I would endorse CycL if and only if
> it were included in the CL (Common Logic) framework that also
> supports KIF, CGs, and the infix notation for predicate calculus.
John, I think it would be a relatively brief exercise to express the CycL
syntax using CL's abstract syntax. The semantics would not be so simple,
however. I suggested to the OpenCyc folks that they provide a semantics in
SKIF (which evolved to CL) and then simply throw themselves at the mercy of
the court that their current inference engine is not in compliance with the
semantics (actually, it seems to me it could be if they turned off some of
the speedup modules and the non-monotonic mechanisms)
.bill