SUO: RE: W3C ontology requirements
Dear Murray,
It is certainly a pretty document, and yes use cases are a good
way to capture requirements. However, these are only requirements
for an ontology language, not for an ontology. It is also
interesting to see how other groups find it necessary to reinvent
things.
In the SUO group, by contrast, we looked at languages that were
already available, and selected one, KIF (Knowledge Interchange
Format) that has been available for a number of years and is
well tried and tested. So we have saved ourselves the whole
piece of work the OWL folk are currently about.
On the other hand developing an upper ontology is a task that
is several orders of magnitude harder than defining a language
to express it in. But at least this is a task that in the
mean time we have made a start on.
I'm sorry if you feel IEEE staff time has been wasted by this
working group. I am also sorry that we seem to be trying to
do this work in an environment where there seems to be so much
uncertainty about the way we should conduct our business.
Matthew West
Principal Consultant
Shell Information Technology International Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Other Tel: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.r.west@is.shell.com
Internet: http://www.shell.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: murray j bent [mailto:murrayb@imailbox.com]
> Sent: 05 February 2002 14:48
> To: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> Subject: SUO: W3C ontology requirements
>
>
>
> A "W3C working draft"
> (http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process-20010719/tr.html#RecsWD)
> about web ontology requirements is at
> http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/owl/
>
> The use-cases in particular are an excellent approach to
> developing requirements. Its a sign of a healthy project that
> these use-cases are becoming more refined over time,
> co-evolving with the owl specification. One thing about the
> IEEE suo-wg that tells me its dead is the lack of activity to
> refine the purpose document
> http://suo.ieee.org/scopeAndPurpose.html
> which is simply cut-and-paste from one year to the next eg in
> the draft formal doc posted by Teknowledge (where
> applications were listed as a blank, TBD).
> Forget the formal wording! Get out there and test and prove
> your proposal works before you watse further IEEE staff time on it.
> Murray Bent
> Member IEEE SA
>
>
>
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