Re: SUO: standards
Erik,
Thank you for supporting my original claim:
> After thinking abou this for a few months, I agree with
> John Sowa, and believe that monolithic ontologies are wrong-headed.
But I don't agree with the conclusion:
> They exclude. This means that there can't be any such thing as
> a "Standard" upper ontology. It seems reasonable to dissolve
> the group, or let it continue to fragment in dissolution and
> disgust, and move on.
The effort that gives me some hope of developing something useful
is Philippe Martin's Multi-Source Ontology (MSO), which I believe
can lead to "a new mindset", as you said:
> On the other hand, maybe this entire line of thought has been
> an indication that there is no serious standards work happening
> here, and there hasn't been for some time, and the group ought
> to give a new mindset a shot?
What Philippe has done is to develop a super hierarchy, which
includes the concept types from three different projects:
WordNet, my KR ontology, and Dolce. Now he is adding the
categories from Matthew's ontology. The next step is to
include the categories from SUMO and OpenCyc. Since both
SUMO and OpenCyc have already been aligned to WordNet, that
provides a good start, which should simplify Philippe's work.
> Standards exclude. By virtue of having them (having one),
> they also enable. Get on with something, or acquiesce as
> a sociological experiment and forget about engineering
> an ontology for a standard.
What IFF has promised is a methodology for relating multiple
independently developed ontologies, but nobody has actually
applied that methodology to the actual starter documents on
the SUO site. By sitting down and doing some hard work in
actually relating multiple ontologies, Philippe has taken
an important first step.
There is still more work to be done, but I hope that having
a super hierarchy that relates all the special cases will give
us a solid target to examine, criticize, revise, and build on.
John Sowa