SUO: RE: SUMO questions

[Ian Niles <iniles@teknowledge.com>]

Hi Erik,

 

    I'll jump in here if that's OK.  You're right that the mapping between the WordNet synsets containing "Department" and the SUMO concepts are not quite right.  In the sense of "department of literature", the mapping should be to the SUMO predicate of 'subOrganization'.  I'll update the WordNet mappings files when I have a chance.   As for a predicate relating organizational departments to their fields of study, there will be one (called 'hasExpertise') in the mid-level ontology we're working on. 

 

    Thanks for your comment.

 

-Ian 

 

 -----Original Message-----
From: Erik Larson [mailto:elarson_78746@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2003 10:54 AM
To: adampease@earthlink.net
Cc: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
Subject: SUO: SUMO questions

Adam,

From the SUMO browser for "Department" entered as an English word:

A specialized sphere of knowledge; "baking is not my department"; "his work established a new department of literature".

SUMO Equivalents: Proposition

This can't be right. A proposition is abstract but a department has a chair, a physical address and so on.

A department is really an instance of an organization, as the SUMO comment makes clear elsewhere, for Organization. Organizations are groups-objects-physical in SUMO (going up the hierarchy), this is good.

Universities are organizations too, so SUMO's subOrganization predicate (or some specialization of it) can be used to relate departments to their universities. There's SUMO vocabulary for FieldOfStudy (a type of proposition), so all that's required is a binary predicate relating departments with their fields of study. If something like departmentFieldOfStudy is too specific, how about groupContentFocus (ouch) or something similar that relates a group of people to a particular set of propositions constituting the reason for the existence of the group?

Erik

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