Re: SUO: Re: Industry takeover
John,
Unfortunately, your intuition doesn't accord with current facts. Take a
look at our web page and you'll see quite a number of ontologies that we
have developed, along with a few that others have. SUMO has been stable in
the face of constant use and extension over the last year. Early on, in
the SUMO development and with our project of linking to WordNet, we did
make a number of additions and changes, but now that we're creating many
domain ontologies, very little needs changing day to day.
Adam
At 06:01 PM 5/2/2003 -0400, John F. Sowa wrote:
>Adam,
>
>Content is very different from formats and
>interfaces. The more content you put into
>an ontology, the more likely it will need to
>be updated, revised, and extended frequently.
>
> > SUMO is stable at this point, but not
> > entirely static. I would envision that we
> > could reach a standard, but that like many
> > standards, it would need periodic, if minor,
> > revision.
>
>As I have mentioned in other notes, stability
>is a questionable goal. In IBM jargon, the term
>"functionally stabilized" is applied to software
>for which maintenance has been terminated -- in
>other words, it is a euphemism for "dead end".
>
>If SUMO has been stable, that is most likely
>a sign that nobody is using it. If they had
>been using it for serious applications, you
>would be getting a steady stream of updates,
>revisions, extensions, and multitudinous
>requests for help in making them.
>
>Furthermore, the whole point of an SUO is
>to support much larger subhierarchies of
>lower-level categories (which, as the Applied
>Semantics people claim, extend into the
>millions). If people were actively linking
>SUMO to all those hierarchies, you would
>have been getting an endless stream of error
>reports about conflicts with and among all
>the incompatible ontologies that are out there.
>
>These are the reasons why I said that the SUO
>must support mechanisms, such as IFF or something
>similar, to support revisions, extensions, mergers,
>subsetting, etc. Any and every application of SUMO
>will require them.
>
>And if you aren't getting such requests on a daily
>basis, that is not a good sign.
>
>John