Re: SUO: Re: Industry takeover
Adam,
What are the statistics about how SUMO has been used?
> 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.
That confirms my point: when you were linking to
something that somebody else had developed, you were
making many changes to SUMO.
But when you add new things to it yourself, I suspect
that you were taking the easy way out, which it to
accept SUMO as is.
What I am most concerned about is the extension to
new applications where you have to adapt to somebody
else's preconceptions. How many people have done
that with SUMO, and what are their experiences?
And your other data also suggests problems:
> While, as Andrei pointed out, proving consistency in
> first order logic is a process that mathematically is
> not guaranteed to terminate...
Yes. In general, it is not guaranteed to terminate,
but for smaller modules, it is possible to prove consistency.
Sometimes, you can make do with relative consistency in terms
of something that has a long-established history of use, such
as the integers.
That is a very important reason for keeping the modules
distinct. You can link them together for those people who
are willing to take a chance, but you also need to let
people make their own choice about which ones to accept.
> ... as well as being impossible in practice on theories of
> any significant size, we have done proofs for consistency
> within specified time boundaries. We found and removed
> inconsistencies found in up to 50-step proofs. We can run
> for days now without finding anything, so we have some
> degree of confidence that SUMO is internally consistent.
For some kinds of applications, that might be acceptable,
but not for others. It is essential to provide individually
tested modules, each of which is guaranteed to be consist,
and larger combinations, which people might accept on a
buyer-beware basis.
The issues of merging and combining modules are not something
that you can limit to the development stage. It is an
issue that arises for every major application.
John