SUO: Motion for a joint SUO project
After all the discussion with Adam, John D, and
others, I have revised my draft motion in the
statement at the end of this note.
The new statement makes it clear that SUMO,
OpenCyc, and IFF are all starting candidates
on an equal footing. It emphasizes that the
developers collaborate to determine how their
work can complement the work of the others.
But it doesn't say how much, if any, of the
three starting projects and documents should
end up in the final standard.
Point #3 replaces the word "lattice" with the
term "generalization hierarchy". I would assume
that the infinite lattice and/or other related
mathematical structures would be part of the
theory underlying the methodology. But the
library of modules would only be a finite subset.
Every lattice of theories is a generalization
hierarchy, but a finite excerpt from a lattice
need not be a lattice.
The methodology mentioned in Point #3 is far
less than what is contained in the IFF document.
It is what I would consider the barest minimum
that should be extracted from IFF to support
the development and use of the modules. I
would leave it up to the development process
to determine how much more of IFF should be
incorporated in the methodology.
Perhaps there could be two resulting documents:
an IEEE Technical Report that presents the full
IFF theory, and a much smaller specification
in the standard of just those operators that
are actually used in the methodology.
I hereby move that the following question should
be put to a vote of the SUO Working Group.
John Sowa
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Should the IEEE P1600.1 Standard Upper Ontology
Working Group commence work on a project to develop
a standard based on three starting candidates,
IFF, OpenCyc, and SUMO, and continuing as follows:
(1) The development process shall include a
collaboration of members of all three groups
and other SUO participants to determine how each
of the three starting candidates can complement
and support the contributions of the others.
(2) The results shall include a library of modules
derived from OpenCyc, SUMO, and/or other sources.
Each module shall consist of closely related
axioms and definitions for some aspect of a
standard upper ontology.
(3) The standard shall include the specification
of a methodology for testing the modules for
consistency, relating them to one another in
a generalization/specialization hierarchy,
and combining two or more modules to derive a
new module that is larger and more specialized
than the modules from which it was derived.