Re: SUO: standards
John F. Sowa wrote:
[...]
> 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.
John,
I was hopeful about the development of a meta-ontology, or
"ontology of ontologies". By that I didn't mean a synthesis
of existing upper ontologies, I meant an analysis of how
ontologies are put together. You could take fifty upper
ontologies and meld them and you'd still be avoiding the
real issue, which is that each ontology is still bound by
the limits of interpretation and understanding, the inability
to create context-free concepts and relations, and the
vagaries of natural language. Melding fifty contexts only
creates a muddle (meldle?).
I would hope that rather than a "super hierarchy", which would
only encapsulate the problems of all of its components, we
could look to something more "meta" rather than "super". I
don't from that expect to see diagrams such as the Tree of
Porphyry, I want to see how diagrams (i.e., ontologies) such
as that are constructed, their underlying secrets, e.g., how
context is modeled across systems, how hierarchies and graphs
are interrelated, etc.
Now, there may be those interested in some "alignment" of
a bunch of commercial and public ontologies. I'm deeply
suspicious about the result because these products were each
developed under such different circumstances and for different
purposes. But rather than dissuade anyone from that effort
(which I suspect is pointless to argue about), I'd rather advocate
for analysis of the commonalities in their structure and methods.
That's where the real value would be, I suspect.
Murray
......................................................................
Murray Altheim http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK .
ABU HISHMA, Iraq, Dec. 6 - As the guerrilla war against Iraqi
insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping
entire villages in barbed wire. [...] "You have to understand
the Arab mind," Capt. Todd Brown, a company commander with the
Fourth Infantry Division, said as he stood outside the gates
of Abu Hishma. "The only thing they understand is force - force,
pride and saving face."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/international/middleeast/07TACT.html?hp