Re: SUO: RE: Ballot may be released Friday (a plea for clarification)
Eric,
I did have a more detailed description in an earlier version
of the motion (see below), but I later simplified the motion
to satisfy some objections.
Eric Peterson wrote:
> Could you please replace point number two of your motion with some brief
> text that describes the virtues you want included from ISO/IEC IS
> 11179-3. I spent some less than fruitful time trying to research my
> ontological concerns in the context of that standard.
But there was some criticism of the detailed version. In
particular, Matthew West said that, although he very strongly
believed in the importance of an ontology registry, he had
some doubts about whether 11179-3 was the most appropriate
version to adopt. Meanwhile, Frank Farance said that he
believed that 11179-3 was general enough to support an
ontology registry.
So rather than make any commitments, I just said "such as",
and left the details for the people who are developing the
standard (i.e., the full SUO group or any part of it that
may be interested) to decide what aspects of which registry
standard should be adopted for an ontology registry.
For the record, following is the version of the motion,
which I sent to the SUO list on May 23. Points #2, #3,
and #4 outline the issues where I believe something like
IS 11179-3 may be relevant. But I simplified that version
after receiving criticisms that it was too detailed.
John
_______________________________________________________________
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.