Re: SUO: Latest Draft Ballot Questions
Jim,
I revised the motion to accommodate suggestions that have
been made during the discussion period.
The major addition responds to the suggestion by Frank Farance
that we should follow the guidelines of ISO/IEC 11179 for
metadata registries. Following is the URL for that standard:
http://farance.com/metadata/iso_iec_11179-3_2003.pdf
As a result, I have introduced the term "ontology registry"
for the collection of modules in the previous motion. I kept
the name "module", but added the clause "Each module shall
consist of a theory together with documentation and other
metadata as specified by IS 11179-3."
This change does not introduce anything that we would not
want to include anyway, such as the notion of "stewardship",
which means that each module shall have an organization that
is responsible for administering it and providing contact
information for anybody who wants to ask a question about it.
The other addition is to require the axioms and definitions
to be stated in some language that conforms to the Common Logic
framework. That includes KIF, CGs, and OWL. To accommodate
OpenCyc, I added the following clause: "As part of this project,
the CycL language or some subset of CycL suitable for specifying
the OpenCyc contributions will be defined as a CL-conformant
language."
The other changes are clarifications of the earlier version.
John Sowa
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Should the IEEE P1600.1 Standard Upper Ontology Working Group
(SUO) commence work on a project to develop a standard for
ontology registration and specification, according to the
following guidelines:
1. The standard shall be based on the contributions of three
SUO candidate projects: IFF, OpenCyc, and SUMO. As the
standard develops, the SUO working group may decide to
include appropriate material from other sources or to
modify or omit any material from the candidate projects
that is not deemed to be suitable.
2. The standard shall specify an ontology registry that conforms
to ISO/IEC IS 11179-3 for metadata registries, but with
appropriate extensions that may be required for defining
ontologies and for relating them to one another.
3. The ontology registry shall be organized as a collection
of modules, each of which is administered under a single
stewardship, as specified by IS 11179-3. The modules
shall be related in a generalization/specialization
hierarchy. Each module shall identify every module in
the registry that is an immediate generalization; it
may identify one or more modules as specializations.
4. Each module shall consist of a theory together with
documentation and other metadata as specified by
IS 11179-3. The theory shall consist of axioms and
definitions stated in a language that conforms to the
Common Logic (CL) standard, which is currently under
development. CL-conformant languages currently include
the Knowledge Interchange Language (KIF), conceptual graphs
(CGs), and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). As part of
this project, the CycL language or some subset of CycL
suitable for specifying the OpenCyc contributions will be
defined as a CL-conformant language.
5. The standard shall include the specification of a methodology
for testing the theory part of any module for consistency,
relating theories to one another in the generalization/
specialization hierarchy, and combining two or more theories
to derive a new theory that is larger and more specialized
than the theories from which it was derived.