RE: SUO: Multi-Source Ontology (MSO) Draft Ballot Question
John F. Sowa wrote
> Rich,
>
> The situation is even worse than that:
>
> > I was surprised to see in Randee Tengi's response
> > that only four part timers are working on WordNet
> > at the present. It seems to me that such a valuable
> > resource could be made very useful to the intense
> > NLP work now beginning to be practical due to the
> > exponentially increasing value of the internet and
> > its contributors. A stronger ontological swing,
> > properly funded of course, might make it so.
>
> There is no budget for the WordNet project, and its
> continued existence depends on intermittent government
> grants, which depend on writing repeated grant proposals,
> each of which depends on how the roulette wheel spins.
>
> John
I remember writing applications while I was teaching CS
at Washington U in St Louis. It was messy, a long shot,
and a very slow schedule of payout. That was one of
the reasons I got out of academia.
Then I was in aerospace, writing proposals for large
and small system development contracts. That was
even worse, but the amounts were huge and tended to
last a few years.
Later, I was writing SBIR proposals to NASA and DoD,
and that was only a little better.
The whole bizarre funding process for government
projects is grotesquely out of whack, but nobody seems
to be able to do anything about it.
But this is an election year, so now would be a good
time to write your representatives. Hope springs
eternal and all that.
Rich