Re: SUO: Re: Missing Ingredients
Jon,
I was thinking about responding to John's rather pessimistic
but accurate message regarding the state of SUO affairs, and
you've again spurred me to think more about this rather than
spending time on my Ph.D., which is either a good thing or a
very bad thing. (In the long term, who knows?) Anyway, what
seemed to me a more valuable deliverable -- if I might be so
bold -- is to not deliver a SUO at all. What's probably even
more valuable to the world would be a set of documents whose
design and purposes were not to create yet another ontology,
but to tell us how to build our own. So that we could create
our own Cycs and put Doug out of business. (Just kidding).
But more seriously, I don't really need a SUO. What I'd like
would be a means of aligning my work not with a SUO but with
specific other ontologies in related domains. Trying to link
up my "authoring ontology" with a common sense ontology is a
close link but not a direct match, and I'd have to deal with
the inconsistencies in language, the differences in contexts
between their designs and a priori assumptions. That's more
work than I prefer to take on, and more work than necessary.
All I want is interop between domain ontologies, not interop
with everything in creation. Authoring ontology to authoring
ontology, medical ontology to medical ontology, without loss.
Now, I know that there are good reasons for upper level work
to be done, with the idea that the SILOs need to align their
things with upper things, but I'm not sure I believe that it
is possible to create a truly general purpose upper ontology,
and if it is possible, we'd still need that set of documents
I mentioned previously; we need the Lego building blocks for
building *any* ontology, ROSO, ULTO, SILO or SUO. That's one
of the reasons why I think Pat wrote LBase, and a reason why
I thought tackling it might open up some of the issues which
at least I didn't understand. It occurs to me that if it can
be explained to me, it can be explained to anyone. I have no
idea how viable LBase is -- whether it's worth its weight in
gold or horse manure. You've also written an enormous corpus
on the subject. What *I* need is a single, succinct ten page
paper that describes the elemental building blocks, the Lego
that's missing. It should have hooks into CL or LBase or ??,
as you feel necessary to ground the material in a mathematic
and logic framework, but that should be a different document,
something kept hidden under the mattress. Or not. Depends on
who the audience is. But to answer Jim's cry for help we all
need to look hard at what the SUO project could deliver that
would assist in ontology creation and interoperability.
Now, I don't think any of this is in conflict with your
goals. Getting a number of those plastic bricks in place
is the beginning of any bigger project anyway.
Murray
Jon Awbrey wrote:
> o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
>
> MI. Note 17
>
> o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
[...]
> In several previous discussions I have introduced a line
> of distinctions among several types of ontology projects.
> Last I recall, I called them ROSO's, ULTO's, and SILO's,
> as described in the following excerpt:
>
> | I have on numerous occasions urged the representatives of
> | various projects in ontological knowledge representation to
> | reflect on their underlying aims and aspirations and to make
> | them more explicit. It seems very likely that some ends may be
> | incompatible, at least in the short term. I have introduced the
> | following "primer lattice" of ontological methods, points or view,
> | or standpoints, that I personally find very helpful in organizing
> | my own reflections on these questions:
> |
> | ROSO = Research Oriented Scientific Ontology
> | ULTO = Upper Level Technical Ontology
> | SILO = Special Interest Local Ontology
> |
> | o ROSO
> | |.
> | | .
> | | o SILO
> | | .
> | |.
> | o ULTO
> |
> | It has been a continuing problem to come up with an accurate name
> | for a common kind of ontological knowledge representation project.
> | If the exponents of these projects begin to present research that
> | would justify the adjective "common", as it would be understood
> | in anthropological, psychological, or sociological terms, then
> | they might begin to earn the name of "common sense ontologies".
> | Until then, it appears to be a popular misnomer, and I will
> | have to keep looking for a technically more accurate nomen.
Murray
......................................................................
Murray Altheim http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK .
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