Ontology Alignment
A conference on Performance Metrics for Intelligent
Systems will be held at NIST in Gaithersburg, MD,
from August 24 to 26:
http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/PerMIS_2004/
Intelligent Systems Division - PerMIS 2004
As part of that conference, there will be a workshop
on ontology alignment on the 25th. To demonstrate
and test the tools for ontology alignment, the
organizers have prepared 8 pairs of ontologies,
expressed in the N3 dialect of OWL. They can be
found at the following web site:
http://www.atl.external.lmco.com/projects/ontology/i3con.html
Anyone who is interested in ontology alignment
might like to test their tools and techniques
on these sample ontologies.
I will also be giving a talk at PerMIS on the 26th
(abstract attached).
John Sowa
The Challenge of Knowledge Soup
John F. Sowa
People have a natural desire to organize, classify, label, and define
the things, events, and patterns of their daily lives. But their
best-laid plans are overwhelmed by the inevitable change, growth,
innovation, progress, evolution, diversity, and entropy. When the
Académie Française attempted to legislate the vocabulary and definitions
of the French language, their efforts were undermined by uncontrollable
developments: rapid growth of slang that is never sanctioned by the
authorities, and wholesale borrowing of words from English, the world's
fastest growing language. In Japan, the pace of innovation and
borrowing has been so rapid that the older generation of Japanese can
no longer read their daily newspapers. These rapid changes, which
create difficulties for people, are far more disruptive for the fragile
databases and knowledge bases in computer systems. The term _knowledge
soup_ better characterizes the fluid, dynamically changing nature of
the information that people acquire, reason about, act upon, and
communicate. This talk addresses the complexity of the knowledge soup,
the problems it poses for intelligent systems, and the methods for
managing it. The most important measure for any intelligent system is
its flexibility in accommodating and making sense of the knowledge soup.