RE: SUO: RE: RE: The Story So Far
Doug,
You expressed concern about the direction of SUO. I would suggest
not worrying about what other people might want SUO to do for them. A
standard can have different uses by different stakeholders. You are a
member of this group and have as much say as anyone in crafting SUO to meet
your needs.
We are somewhat bounded by the Scope (copy below), but even that
could change if the group desires. The Purpose (copy below) lists a variety
of application areas, but that is meaningless unless members work to build
such capabilities into SUO.
What I am saying is that it matters little what the past intent was
of participants. It matters much what current members to do in developing
SUO. If you have a need, pursue it.
Jim
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You Wrote:
I came to this list as a step in a long career of trying to
refine these
schemes and usages to make them more practical and useful in a world
that is increasingly permeated and dependent on interoperating software
mediations of human communication. In recent exchanges I am learning that
this endeavor (IEEE SUO) was conceived by folks who have a different
concern.
I am still trying to really understand what that motivating concern is, and
whether
it has any relevance to the work I am trying to do. The words "useful
commercial/industrial systems" give me hope for commonality. The rejection
of all of natural language and existing classification schemes pretty
effectively
snuffs that glimmer of hope.
Doug McDavid
Certified Executive Consultant
Voice of the Practitioner Initiatives
Professional Development - BIS, Americas
Member of IBM Academy of Technology
mcdavid@us.ibm.com -- 916-549-4600
Scope of Proposed Project:
(The Scope describes what is being done, including the technical boundaries
of the project.)
This standard will specify an upper ontology that will enable computers to
utilize it for applications such as data interoperability, information
search and retrieval, automated inferencing, and natural language
processing. An ontology is similar to a dictionary or glossary, but with
greater detail and structure that enables computers to process its content.
An ontology consists of a set of concepts, axioms, and relationships that
describe a domain of interest. An upper ontology is limited to concepts that
are meta, generic, abstract and philosophical, and therefore are general
enough to address (at a high level) a broad range of domain areas. Concepts
specific to given domains will not be included; however, this standard will
provide a structure and a set of general concepts upon which domain
ontologies (e.g. medical, financial, engineering, etc.) could be
constructed.
Purpose of Proposed Project:
A. AUTOMATED REASONING: The standard will be suitable for automated logical
inference to support knowledge-based reasoning applications.
B. INTER-OPERABILITY: The standard will provide a basis for achieving
Inter-Operability among various software and database applications.
1) Application developers can define new data elements in terms of a common
ontology, and thereby gain some degree of interoperability with other
conformant systems.
2) Applications based on domain-specific ontologies that are compliant with
this standard will be able to interoperate (to some degree) by virtue of the
shared common terms and definitions.
3) The SUO will play the role of a neutral interchange format whereby owners
of existing applications will be able to map existing data elements just
once to a common ontology. This provides a degree of interoperability with
other applications whose representations conform to SUO. This entails the
SUO being able to be mapped to more restricted forms such as XML, database
schema, or object oriented schema.
C: APPLICATION AREAS
1) E-commerce applications from different domains that need to interoperate
at both the data and semantic levels.
2) Educational applications in which students learn concepts and
relationships directly from, or expressed in terms of, a common ontology.
This will also enable a standard record of learning to be kept.
3) Natural language understanding tasks in which a knowledge-based reasoning
system uses the ontology to disambiguate among likely interpretations of
natural language statements.