Re: SUO: Re: OpenCyc Motion Open for Discussions
I have a question for the proposer of the
OpenCyc as an IEEE standard:
If there are substantial changes in the OpenCyc
proposed and accepted by a vote of the voting
participants in this list, how would the resulting
ontology be treated by Cycorp? If there are substantial
changes to the OpenCyc, presumably some of the
existing applications that Cycorp has built using
the OpenCyc would not work without modification.
Would Cycorp then disown the resulting modified
ontology, or try to adopt it as their own
ontology, or at least try to create some form
of mapping of the original OpenCyc with the
modified version? Is the OpenCyc an all-or-nothing
proposition?
My view of the present OpenCyc is that there is
a great deal of useful structure in it, and much
obvious careful thought has gone into the elements
of the ontology. But the result appears far too
complicated to serve as a starting ontology that
will permit multiple participants to carefully
consider the various choices that need to be made
in building an ontology. Many of the choices of
hierarchy and predicates appear to be tuned to a
particular method of reasoning, the rationale for
which is not obvious from the OpenCyc itself.
Perhaps the OpenCyc would be logically consistent
with a simpler representation of the same
concepts, and could be mapped to a simpler
ontology.
In order to have an objective basis for making
choices, I think we really need some kind of application,
however simple, to start to evaluate alternatives.
I haven't had the time recently to look carefully
into the demo programs provided with the OpenCyc
release. Has anyone examined any one of the applications
and begun to figure out what elements of the
OpenCyc are essential for that application?
Pat
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Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc. || (908) 561-3416
735 Belvidere Ave. || (908) 668-5252 (if no answer)
Plainfield, NJ 07062-2054 || (908) 668-5904 (fax)
internet: cassidy@micra.com
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