Re: SUO: Re: Focus and Volume
>Jon Awbrey wrote:
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> > 3. Square One is that everybody who makes a contribution to the
> > main list probably does so because they honestly believe that
> > it has a bearing on what a State of the Art Third Millennium
> > Ontology System ought to look like, even if that makes some
> > State of the Art 1979 folks uncomfortable with the amount of
> > work and the number of different expertises that would really
> > be required to avoid cranking out yet another standard that
> > all innovative people will have to work against from Day One.
>
>
>There's a spectrum of views on
>the extent to which the SUO should be
>pushing the state of the art as opposed to more simply
>reflecting current accepted/best practice.
It isnt clear to me that there really IS a currently accepted or best
practice in this area. We would do well to remember that there really
are only a few upper ontologies in existence, and many of their
authors are contributors to this list (and the other major author,
Doug Lenat, is firmly of the opinion that the upper levels of a
large-scale ontology are largely irrelevant.)
>In my opinion, a shared statement on where we are along this spectrum
>would give us a metric which would identify a good fraction of all
>previously posted paragraphs as not relevant (to the group per se).
I would suggest that a more useful spectrum along which to place
opinions would be the one that has Doug at one end and probably Adam
at the other, which estimates the likely relevance of upper levels of
the ontology to anything said at lower levels. Doug's view, if I can
capture it well enough in a brief sentence, is that the inheritance
structure of any ontology only becomes important when the density of
axioms becomes reasonably high, since until there are significant
numbers of things to say that are likely to be usefully inherited
downwards, the heirarchy is really no more than decoration. Put into
less contentious and more functional terms, this might be paraphrased
as the methodological requirement that any high-level distinction be
justified in terms of some assertions that are likely to have
inheritable downward consequences, ie that something useful can be
inferred about some thing or category X by virtue of it being placed
under the high-level category. Doug's opinion can then be derived
from his extensive experience as the observation that very little can
be usefully said at the very high levels which is likely to have any
useful consequences at any lower levels, that could not be said
better or more easily at those lower levels directly.
The other end of this opinion spectrum holds that getting the upper
levels 'right' in some sense (there may be several senses involved,
by the way) is a prerequisite, or at any rate a desideratum, for
creating an ontology with well-structured lower levels. This is the
more popular opinion - some seem to take it as almost axiomatic - but
it seems to me that this case is the harder one to make, if a case
needs to be made. I would suggest that a more useful and productive
debating topic than the ones that have been cluttering this list so
far might arise if those who feel that an upper ontology is obviously
useful, could provide arguments for this position. At the very least,
this would be a start at exposing the various assumptions and goals
that drive the SUO effort, and might help to clarify how these
various opinions relate to each other. Since we often seem to be
trying to pull the effort in different directions, this might be
worth taking a little time over.
Pat Hayes
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