Re: SUO: SUOP :> Ontologies Of Ontologies
Jon --
I noticed that you referred to this thread a couple of times recently. I
am following the discussion in SUO-WG, but have very little time to
participate. However, since you did mention my name in conjunction with
the earlier discussion, let me just quickly mention my main thoughts on
this subject.
There seems to be an unmistakeable trend toward more and more varied
efforts that might be called domain-specific ontologies or controlled
vocabularies. This trend is encouraged by global commercial and
intellectual interconnection, which is enabled by ubiquitous computing and
telecommunications. This, in turn, drives the need for semantic
interoperability, which is all about agreement among senders and receivers
of messages about the signs that are transmitted back and forth.
As there are increasing pockets of commerce and conversation where
communications are more standardized, an opportunity begins to emerge th
try to support standardized communication across these partitioned areas of
standardized semantics. This is where a standardized upper-level ontology
can come into play, as a mechanism for semantic reconcilliation across
various pockets of standardization.
These are thoughts that lead me to think about a SUO as an ontology of
ontologies. This would imply a scheme for characterizing various
ontologies in terms of key factors of interoperability. At the heart of
such characterization would be an articulation of the purposes served by
the individual domain-specific ontologies and controlled vocabularies.
Consequently, the most important semantic domain for such an ontology of
ontologies would be the domain of purposes.
Doug McDavid
Almaden Services Research
IBM Academy of Technology
mcdavid@us.ibm.com
ASR - http://www.almaden.ibm.com/asr/
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/coevolution/
BASIS - http://www.research.ibm.com/basis/
Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@att.net>
Sent by: To: SUO <standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>
owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordo cc:
mo.ieee.org Subject: SUO: SUOP :> Ontologies Of Ontologies
11/14/2003 01:52 PM
Please respond to Jon Awbrey
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SUOP.OOO. Note 1
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SUO Group,
I find that the issue of "ontologies of ontologies" (OOO's)
has arisen again in the process of pursuing the SUOP issues,
and though I'm not fond of namespatialization, and far less
its hypercatenation, I'll need to keep a more organized log
of the wealth of issues that are arising under this heading,
and so I'll try it as a temporizing measure, for the moment.
In running through a Google search on the issue,
I notice many former discussions on the question,
plus a small cottage industry of other papers on
the subject, though I cannot say yet whether they
are relevant to the procedural issues that concern
me at this point in time. If any of these folks are
still tuned in, I wonder if some of them could tell
me what it was about, so that I might determine if
their past thoughts can be of any assistance to me.
Here is the list-in-progress that I've compiled so far
of some of the people that seemed to be connected with
the previous discussions of this question: Fred Chase,
Nicola Guarino, Robert Kent, Doug McDavid, Leonid Ototsky,
Sofia Pinto, and Mike Uschold.
Here is my earlier notice on the relevance of the OOO issue:
SUOP 02. http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg11593.html
I noticed, with all due fear and trembling, that
Robert Kent has this text among the IFF documents:
RK: http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/pdf00004.pdf
Thanks In Advance,
Jon Awbrey
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