Re: SUO: Unanswered Questions About SUMO Set Theory
Frank,
Please go reread my postings to the SUO list and reread all the
material I have put on my web site over the past few years.
FF> My sense of why Adam includes you in the "different direction
> department" is that he is being polite. Simply put (or "bottom
line", > as you like to say): you've not contributed any standards
wording to
> this project ... on any of the approaches. You've not proposed any
> improvements ... you've only had complaints, platitudes, and
> digressions.
On the contrary, Frank, if you had read and understood those postings
and the material that I put on my web site, you would see that I have
been consistently working toward a consensus of the SUO efforts around
a practical, theoretically sound system.
FF> Sure, not everyone will agree with what has been proposed, but there
> is little "meat" in your statements. You've complained many times
> about defects in SUMO, yet provide no alternative wording (inside or
> outside the context of SUMO). "Where's the beef?"
The beef, Frank, is in the IFF. That is the framework. SUMO and
OpenCyc are content that can nicely fit inside the IFF. But without
the IFF, SUMO and OpenCyc are worse than useless.
FF> I believe you have a misunderstanding about standards. Standards
> are supposed to be "good enough" for the stakeholders involved. While
> perfection is a desirable goal, sometimes it's not possible. But the
> real question is: can we get to something that is good enough? The
> reason why good enough might be (well) good enough is that we have a
> corrigendum (bug fix) process, an amendment (minor improvement)
> process, and a revision process (major improvement, reality check on
> current technology).
I'm not proposing perfection. I am only suggesting the physician's
first command: "Non nocere" -- don't make it worse. Any single
ontology, by itself, would be a disaster. But a framework that can
accommodate any and all ontologies together with some suitable
starters, such as SUMO, OpenCyc, and many others, can be very useful.
FF> More platitudes. Got some standards wording to propose?
Yes: "The SUO standard shall consist of the IFF framework
with the SUMO and OpenCyc contributions included as content
modules within the framework. Both the SUMO and the OpenCyc
ontologies shall be broken into a collection of the modules
from which each was constructed, and those modules shall be
organized in a lattice that shows how each of them is related
to each of the others as generalizations, specializations, and
alternatives. The operators defined within the IFF framework
shall be used to derive the mappings and relationships between
the modules."
Generating the standards wording is a trivial exercise. The hard
part is to get some very thick skulls to recognize that they would
have a disaster on their hands if they continue as they have.
John Sowa