Re: Key questions about common upper ontologies
Hi John,
I agree that Jim seems to be asking the right questions, along with
yours of "what deliverables?". However, I'm not sure the commonest use
case would be the large organization, rather the smaller, more
domain-specific enterprise (which would in effect correspond to the
departments in the big org).
The scenario I envisage would be not unlike that which has been growing
in the RDF world with the WordNet schema (and others similar). When
defining a term in a domain-specific schema it's possible to point to
the corresponding term in the dictionary (e.g. in the Pet Profile schema
I've been working on, mypet:Pet is a subclass of wordnet:Pet). At
present the usage is something of a blunt instrument, but ongoing work
on the RDF Thesauri [1] should allow more fine-grain qualified
application of broad-range vocabularies like WordNet.
I believe there's a not insignificant benefit lurking in this selective,
per-domain approach. Users of a common upper ontology don't have to
subscribe to the whole ontology. If I didn't like WordNet's definition
of 'Cat' then I can simply use a definition from elsewhere without there
being a conflict with its definition in the WN vocabulary. Likewise,
interoperability will be enhanced where terms are shared, grounded (if
that's the correct word) in the SUO, without a need for adoption of the
whole system. Aside from the practical implications this could be
politically expedient, as I know there are plenty of folks that aren't
comfortable with the notion of a single global Uber-ontology (self
included). In other words, SUO can be useful without having to please
all the people all the time.
Cheers,
Danny.
[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/rdfthes.html
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