SUO: RE: Consensus?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: sowa [mailto:sowa@bestweb.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2003 6:53 PM
> To: Robert E. Kent; Adam Pease; SUO; Patrick Cassidy; Jay Halcomb
> Subject: SUO: Consensus?
>
>
> Pat, Jay, Adam, and Robert,
>
> With the recent flurry of notes, I believe we
> can see light at the end of the email tunnel.
>
> 1. Pat made the observation that the joint
> motion is actually a proposal for a new
> ontology, which is based on, but different
> from both:
[ELP] I don't at all in principle oppose the "new" ontology - as long as
we are willing to wait for the extra merging time and the time for the
proving of the new ontology. I have a hard time envisioning such a
newly crafted/merged ontology to be up to the level of robustness of
OpenCyc in less than a couple or three or five years of hard work - and
that is with strong participation.
This may argue for just picking A or B rather than constructing a C.
<snip>
> 2. Jay supported that idea and suggested that we call it
> SUM -- Standard Upper Meta-ontology. But we should
> probably get the letter L in there for "Library".
> We can leave that as a challenge for the acronym
> hackers.
[ELP] To me, the key entities in a SUO are the domain entities such as
person, place, event, etc. These items I consider to be first class
data rather than data about data. The term "meta" is diluting and
becoming more meaningless with every passing day. Meta to me entails
axioms about axioms, attribute facets like in Ontolingua, or some other
such notational variant of the same notion.
I expect such meta-descriptions to be in an SUO, but the term SUM
suggests to me that they are the only constituent. At the risk of being
a bit redundant, I might call it the SUO Upper Ontology.
<snip>