SUO: Re: An article on the pitfalls of metadata
Dear Natthew,
I'm about to leave to catch a plane, so I can
only comment very briefly to one point:
> MW: The standards work has been focussed, and low level
> in that sense, but it has been interesting to note that
> we have been "forced" by a pragmatic approach to develop
> an upper level ontology.
I wouldn't be participating in this exercise if I
didn't believe that a good SUO was (a) important and
(b) achievable.
But as I said in earlier notes, my major complaint
about the three top contenders -- Cyc, SUMO, and
Dolce -- is that they were developed from the top
down by some human being(s) who drew trees or
lattices by hand.
I have been arguing since the SUO exercise began
that the top levels must start with
1. distinctions, which may be selected by humans.
2. axioms, which may also be selected by humans.
But the overall structure of concept types and
subtypes must be computed by systematic algorithms
(of which there are many -- Formal Concept Analysis,
FCA, is one well-known example). And the computation
must take into account the low-level details of the
kinds of entities that are being classified.
This point has been completely ignored by the
developers of all three of the candidates.
I have minor qualifications to make on your
other points, but all of them are related to
this one big issue: we must derive the hierarchy
from the bottom up, not impose it by someone's
best guess. Furthermore, I would emphasize
that no one's guess -- not even mine -- is
good enough to accept for a standard.
And as I said many times before, I think that
your practical experience is important. But
since your categories were very close to the
applications, you had solid guidance for your
selections, even if they were made by hand.
When we are dealing with very high-level
abstractions, nobody's intuitions are good
enough to provide guidance. We need algorithms
for deriving the hierarchy automatically.
There are several that have been widely used,
and we should seriously look at them to see
what they can do.
John