RE: SUO: RE: Topic Maps
Dear John,
You completely miss the point. This is not an issue of KIF or Topic Maps.
Topic Maps only provides a structuring and linking capability - precisely
what KIF doesn't have.
There are two points:
1. Topic Maps can help us to organise our KIF theories - manage the network
for us. All we get with KIF is something monolithic.
2. If we are going to get the SUO used, we need to make it easily
accessible. We could aid this with the use of Topic Maps.
What is being suggested has nothing to do with how the ontology is defined.
There is an issue that KIF is unintelligible to all but a few cognoscenti,
but that is not what is addressed here.
Regards
Matthew
============================================
Matthew West
Operations & Asset Management
Shell Services International
H3229, Shell Centre, London, SE1 7NA, UK.
Tel: +44 207 934 4490 Fax: 7929
Mobile: +44 7796 336538
E-mail: Matthew.R.West@is.shell.com
http://www.shellservices.com/
============================================
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John F. Sowa [mailto:sowa@bestweb.net]
> Sent: 15 February 2001 17:32
> To: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> Subject: Re: SUO: RE: Topic Maps
>
>
>
> I would like to emphasize and expand upon some points
> by Pat Hayes, which I heartily endorse:
>
> >>Topic Maps is slated as the infrastructure for the way that
> semantics on the
>
> >>web are going to be managed.
> >
> >Really? By whom? W3C seems to have committed to RDF
> >http://www.w3.org/2000/07/hs78/rdf-ms as the basis for its
> >'semantic web' effort (http://www.w3.org/2000/01/sw/), and Darpa is
> >funding DAML+OIL http://dtsn.darpa.mil/iso/programtemp.asp?mode=347
> >, http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/DAML-OIL/ which is now close to
> >an international standard, being compatible both with the
> >EEC-mandated OIL http://www.ontoknowledge.org/oil/ and RDF. Several
> >of us are involved with the DAML+OIL initiative, so I think that on
> >the whole we are fairly well on, if not ahead, of this curve.
>
> I would like to point out that all of these notations, Topic
> Maps, RDF, DAML, OIL, SQL, Express, Epistle, and even English
> and other natural languages, are built upon exactly the same
> primitives as good old fashioned first-order logic. Whatever
> strength and generality any of these notations may have, it is
> derived almost entirely from their ability to express some or
> all of the primitives of first-order logic. Whatever weaknesses
> or limitations these notations may have is almost always the
> result of not being able to combine all the primitives of FOL
> in the simplest and most flexible ways.
>
> That is why we have adopted FOL as the foundation for KIF and
> conceptual graphs. There are many more issues to be discussed
> about logic and language, but support for FOL is the minimum
> prerequisite for beginning to address the issues. For starters,
> I recommend my ontometa paper, which presents the five basic
> primitives and their expression in English, RDF, predicate
> calculus (or KIF), existential graphs, and conceptual graphs:
>
> http://www.bestweb.net/~sowa/peirce/ontometa.htm
>
> See Sections 2 and 3 of that paper for a summary of what kinds
> of features *MUST* be present in any adequate notation. (There
> may be other desirable features as well, but any notation that
> cannot express these is, as they say, a "nonstarter".)
>
> >>If we wait before getting involved with Topic Maps, then
> some other group
>
> >>will grab the opportunity, and we risk being consigned to
> the dustbin of
> >>irrelevance (the Betamax of ontologies).
> >>
> >>Let me put it the other way. If we don't want to be an
> ontology for the web,
>
> >>what do we want to be an ontology for?
>
> >'an ontology for the web' is a tricky phrase. We certainly
> want to be
> >an ontology ON the web, and hopefully a valuable web resource. But
> >the 'ontology FOR the web' is often taken to mean an
> ontology for use
> >by web agent software, and I think that most of the SUO isnt in fact
> >directed chiefly to that goal.
>
> The basic point is that if you can support FOL, you've got
> a foundation for everything. If you can't support FOL,
> you've got a limited notation with built-in limitations.
>
> KIF, CGs, and other logic-based systems can represent each
> other (in the sense that anything represented in either of them
> can be mapped into the other without any semantic loss), and
> they can also represent Topic Maps, RDF, and whatever else may
> be thrown at them.
>
> If anyone has any other pet notation to propose, their first
> step to prove minimal adequacy is to demonstrate that they can
> support KIF and CGs.
>
> John Sowa
>