SUO: RE: Re: Missing Ingredients
Jon Awbrey wrote:
<snip\>
> TJ: 1.1. Our goal, I take it, is to increase the semantic
> interoperability
> of databases. This means, I take it, (although I
> have found no
> description of any such thing on the SUO website)
> is to create
> a registration framework for real world databases.
>
> Tom,
>
> There's about 20 years worth of research on "deductive databases"
> that I can remember just since the first standard textbooks began
> to appear. But you said bottoms-up, and I'm all for that, well,
> let me check -- yes, it's an odd-numbered day where I am, so OK.
>
> Let us try to approach the question
> of "semantic inter-operability" (SIO)
> by way of the following sub-questions:
>
> 1. What is the "meaning" of a "set of sentences" (SOS)?
>
> 2. What is the "meaning" of a "table of tuples" (TOT)?
>
> 3. How shall we compare the "meanings" of these two?
>
> I will give you and me both time to think and then get back to you.
>
> Jon Awbrey
This set of three questions is the most important triple we're
dealing with in all SUO work. Getting clear answers to how
meaning is represented, communicated, stored, compared and
organized would be a successful result.
We have predefined the answer to be an ontology. Then we refined
that concept to include the lattice of ontologies, plus the IFF
framework, but I still get the feeling there's a lot of stuff left
out.
So I agree with Tom that the focus should be refined further
to incorporate real world database concepts, and I add one more
suggestion; that we should be working with natural language
words and sentences to impose the type structure, or class
structure, and property lists, of common everyday concepts like
address, customer, person, ..., fill in your favorite concepts.
Finally, since we haven't been able to agree on more enhanced
ontologies than WordNet, perhaps we should start the bottom-up
process by extracting exactly the ontology that WordNet provides.
This could be one of the bottom-level concept sets, along with
others that may appear in the lattice as we continue.
Rich