Re: SUO: RE: Ballot may be released Friday (a plea for clarification)
Pierre, Matthew, Eric, et al.,
Officially speaking, the only vote that means anything
is the final vote to approve some document as the Final
Committee Draft, which will then be circulated to the
entire world. If nobody objects to that final draft,
then it will be blessed as an official IEEE Standard.
But as Matthew observed, a lot of politics, compromises,
consensus building, and just plain work will be necessary
before a good, if not perfect Committee Draft is written.
Technically speaking, Pierre is correct in observing that
these votes will have no binding effect on what anyone
actually does. But the group does need a statement of
goals to focus attention on a recommended direction.
As I and some other people believe, the joint motion
subsumes Adam's motion and makes it redundant. But
in the spirit of compromise, I agreed to vote for
Adam's motion if he will vote for mine. I have no
objection to redundant voting if it will help to
promote consensus.
Eric advocated a third ontology. That is possible:
> But I would certainly support resolution #2 with an additional point
> stating that the goal of the effort would be to create a third content
> ontology (which could be composed of multiple theories which would be
> tied together in IFF fashion) which would be a merge of OpenCyc and
> SUMO. That third ontology would also be the SUO.
To clarify the point, I am including another copy of the
suohier2.gif diagram, which shows how the modules derived
from SUMO and OpenCyc could fit together. That diagram
can also be found on my web site:
http://www.jfsowa.com/figs/suohier2.gif
The yellow box in the middle, which has the label
"Customized", might be considered as a "third ontology".
In my earlier note, I said that this ontology was
a "special purpose" ontology. But it is possible that
some such combination might turn out to be superior to
either SUMO or OpenCyc. If so, the SUO committee could
vote to give it a privileged status over any of the others.
However, I am afraid that such a proposal at this time
might raise more acrimony and contention than consensus.
I believe that our time would be more productively spent
in starting the actual work on both SUMO and OpenCyc,
while using and refining the IFF methodology to see how
and whether they can be related, merged, and/or combined.
If during the course of that work, some third ontology,
such as the one in yellow in suohier2.gif should prove
to be more attractive than anything else we have ever
seen, then we can have another vote to make it the
primary product of the SUO effort.
Bottom line: I suggest that we leave the motion as it
stands, and see how things progress. If some great new
ontology emerges, we can take another vote later.
John Sowa
