Re: SUO: OpenCyc Motion
At 10:48 AM 6/3/2002 -0500, Pierluigi Miraglia wrote:
>On Sat, Jun 01, 2002 at 11:36:18PM -0400, John F. Sowa wrote:
>> MP> Secondly, is it part of this group's purpose to make a decision
>> > as to whether CycL or any language is to be the/a knowledge
>> > representation language for IEEE standard ontology? Even if
>> > does make sense for us to focus our energy on the selection and
>> > development of a KRL, it seems that the decision of whether or not
>> > to consider/develop OpenCyc is based on very different sorts of
>> > considerations than a question of whether or not to consider/develop
>> > CycL as a standard KRL. Hence, I'm not sure it makes sense to
>> > conflate the two decisions in a single motion.
>>
>> I agree with this point more strongly than I agree with the
>> previous one. At various times in the past dozen or so years,
>> I have talked with Doug Lenat, Fritz Lehmann, and other Cyclers
>> about the differences between CycL, KIF, conceptual graphs, and
>> other similar languages. At other times, various people, including
>> many of my friends and colleagues, have written translators to and
>> from CycL and KIF, CGs, and other logic-based languages. These
>> translators have always managed to capture a sufficiently large
>> subset of both CycL and the other language to support useful
>> interoperability.
>
>I should premise that while I share Mike's expressed misgivings about
>CycML, I'm of the opinion that CycL is suitable to be a
>general-purpose kr and knowledge entry language. But I would be
>interested in knowing your (John Sowa's) comparative results about CycL,
>CG and KIF, and others if available (I imagine your book to be a source
>w.r.t. CG, but please send pointers to others).
>
Just to be quite clear, I was most certainly *not* expressing misgivings
about the suitability of CycL for general-purpose KRL. I concur that it
is quite suitable for such purposes. I was suggesting:
a) that it may not be part of the SUO group's mandate to choose a KRL.
b) even if it is part of of the SUO group's focus, the question of
adopting OpenCyc as a SUO candidate is usefully distinguished from the
question of adopting CycL as a standard KRL. Such a request is completely
consistent with believing that both, one or neither are perfectly wonderful
wrt to their respective selection criteria.
best regards,
Mike Pool
________________________________
Mike Pool
Information Extraction & Transport, Inc.
(703) 841-3500 x632
(703) 841-3501 Fax