Re: SUO: RE: RE: Missing ingredient
Tom Johnston wrote:
> No need to continue this thread. If the goal here is not to increase the
> semantic interoperability of databases, as you say, then I am in the wrong
> forum.
>
> Thanks for your reply.
>
> Tom Johnston
Tom,
The way I look at this, from an interoperability standpoint, is
that if you're not trying to build an inference engine *within*
the database, but rather trying to identify components of the
database as according to a known ontology/taxonomy/vocabulary,
then have components of those things need to be a form that
they can be canonically identified. In Topic Maps we call the
solution to this "PSIs", or Published Subject Identifiers, which
are simply URIs that have been made public within a community,
and are considered stable for the purposes stated.
To be able to map between sets of PSIs is something Topic Maps
are very good at. I look at all of the upper ontologies as
perhaps providing sets of PSIs that enable both statements of
interoperability to be made between components in different
systems (e.g., I could claim that
http://purl.org/ceryle/psi/authoring/#Thing
is semantically identical to
http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/vocab/fundamental-vocab.html#Thing
and be done with defining, for the purposes of interoperability.
Same with databases. And any reasoning that can be done upon
those ontology/taxonomy/vocabulary components can be done upon
the database components identified as having the same subject.
I think that perhaps we're just mixing up design of an ontology
system with specific application of it. I don't *quite* understand
yet how you would design the ontology system from the bottom up,
using the database components as the model, unless there was an
upper framework of some sort to enable reasoning, *if* you want
reasoning. If not, then just a set of PSIs would do.
I think that upper ontologies will have an enormous effect on
interoperability of all kinds of systems, and getting it right
will keep us from making some bad reasoning errors, like assuming
that if you know somebody named Osama you must be a terrorist.
Given the tight tie-in between databases and reasoning, it seems
like a very important task.
My 2p, anyway.
Murray
......................................................................
Murray Altheim http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK .
Monkeys use thoughts to control robotic arm
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/13/MN2018.DTL
Bush uses media expertly to push apocalyptic view
http://truthout.org/docs_03/091403J.shtml