Re: SUO: Re: Negotiation Instead of Legislation
Leo --
I want to endorse your point that:
"Pragmatically, I wish we had a better [standard upper ontology/ies]
back in the recent days of constructing ontologies in the product
and service space of business-to-business electronic commerce, or in
the more remote days of constructing ontologies for command and
control replanning and decision support, or the even more remote
days of designing and engineering aircraft."
Your emphasis on applications is something that I have consistently
tried to inject into this Working Group. Discussions of applications
and how upper ontologies might provide mediating structure have
occasionally broken out here, but this has been rare. I was about to
piggyback on the thread about whether a language is a linguistic
expression to make this point again. However, I'd rather make it in
the context of a supporting statement such as yours, above.
So, let me pose the question to the list, especially David Whitten,
Ian Niles, and Scott Farrar:
What applications do you have in mind when you debate constructs such
as:
(subclass WrittenLinguisticExpression LinguisticExpression)
(subclass SpokenLinguisticExpression LinguisticExpression)
(subclass GesturalLinguisticExpression LinguisticExpression)
How do you envision that these assertions will interface with other
ontologies? What kinds of application-level ambiguities will be
able to be disambiguated by this kind of structure? What are the
practical purposes that will be served, in what kinds of working
domains, for these particular constructs?
These questions can apply to all content of the SUMO, or alternative.
Doug McDavid
Member, IBM Academy of Technology
mcdavid@us.ibm.com
"Imagine all the people ... living life in peace."
Leo Obrst <lobrst@mitre.org>@majordomo.ieee.org on 02/23/2002 03:20:02 PM
Please respond to Leo Obrst <lobrst@mitre.org>
Sent by: owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org
To: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>
cc: welty@cs.vassar.edu, standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org, cg@cs.uah.edu
Subject: Re: SUO: Re: Negotiation Instead of Legislation
Actually, "their" goals (i.e., the Semantic Web folks, Hendler,
Berners-Lee, et al.) are far more practical/pragmatic than people think.
In fact, it's exceedingly practical (or practicable, as my old English
teacher would say). It's true that there are now model theoretic
semantics for some of these emerging languages, which I think early
proponents had to fight for, but now have largely convinced the masses
on the utility for (one way of agreeing on the semantics of your
semantic language). But mostly the pragmatists and practitioners and
implementors are the ones in power on these efforts. We quasi-purists
suggest as best we can. Pat Hayes, for example, is the prime mover for
the RDF(S) model theory and is active in OWL (Ontology Web Language), as
is Peter Patel-Schneider, a language formalist from way back (the
description logic Classic, etc.)
The main point of the Semantic Web in fact is that there be "these
suitable tools" John speaks of. Many of us believe we can have and eat
the cake.
Where is a standard upper ontology/ies in all of this? Pragmatically, I
wish we had a better one/s back in the recent days of constructing
ontologies in the product and service space of business-to-business
electronic commerce, or in the more remote days of constructing
ontologies for command and control replanning and decision support, or
the even more remote days of designing and engineering aircraft. All of
these efforts I have been involved in, and in each of them, too much of
our time was spent in developing "upper" ontologies to support our
"domain" ontologies, which really was our direct task. Why? Because
everyone of them needed space, time, parthood, connection, etc.,
concepts and axioms. And too often knowledge-savvy developers who knew
nothing about the semantic modeling issues involved with such concepts
had to "wing it" wrt an upper axiomatization in order to focus on their
domain concepts. Times have NOT changed: this is still the way it is.
How many times has a Unit of Measure ontology been invented in this
world? TOO MANY TIMES. Look at all the object models across the world
created in UML: they are all reinventing pieces of the upper model and
doing it much worse than we can do it here in the SUO.
So I wouldn't belittle our task. And I definitely wish people here would
take it seriously.
Leo
"John F. Sowa" wrote:
>
> Chris,
>
> I think we more or less agree. There are undoubtedly many
> differences at a more detailed level, but we can ferret them
> out later.
>
> JS>> But I am coming to the conclusion that you don't need a single
> >> fixed upper level -- you can create whatever upper level you
> >> need from the choice of distinctions that are important to
> your problem.
>
> CW> I agree with this as well. But I don't see a problem with
> > selecting some small number of frequently used combinations and >
putting
> them out there for people to use. Some people find the > distinctions a
bit
> tough to get around, but upper level
> > categories are usually intuitive to most people.
>
> I agree. In fact, I don't believe that Cyc, SUMO, et al.,
> are useless, even though I don't think that they should be
> adopted as standards. I would consider them "useful resources"
> from which suitable tools could extract much of what is needed
> for any particular problem.
>
> > If Hendler&Berners-Lee get their wish, there will be a lot of
> > people out there building ontologies, and most of them won't
> > know a distinction from a dipswitch. But there's a chance
> > they'll know a process from a living being.
>
> Well, I don't think Hendler, Berners-Lee, et al., will get
> their wish (even though they'll burn a lot of money trying).
> But I believe that with suitable tools we can accomplish
> goals that are different from, but far more practical than
> what they have been preaching.
>
> John
--
_____________________________________________
Dr. Leo Obrst The MITRE Corporation
mailto:lobrst@mitre.org Intelligent Information Management/Exploitation
Voice: 703-883-6770 7515 Colshire Drive, M/S W640
Fax: 703-883-1379 McLean, VA 22102-7508, USA