Re: SUO: Latest Draft Ballot Questions
Pat,
I agree that the word "may" is too weak, since the specification
of an ontology requires much more than is contained in IS 11179.
The other clauses state those requirements, but to emphasize
the point, I updated point #2 as well.
Following is the revised version (identical to the previous
version, except for the last two lines of point #2).
John
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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
the extensions that are required to define ontologies and
to relate 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.