SUO: Fwd from Pierre Grenon
From: "Pierre Grenon" <pierre.grenon@ifomis.uni-leipzig.de>
To: <standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>
Subject: AW: SUO: OpenCyc Motion
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 2002 17:26:01 +0200
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It seems that I had troubles with email today or something weird happen
because of the intended cross posting in reply to John's mail. Here's a
re-post of my friendly rant. Apologies in advance for possible
duplicates.
John,
I too share Mike's concern and/or wonderment. But now, it seems to me
that
you're running two separate tasks together.
One of Mike's point was precisely that the SUO WG apparently ought to not
rule on the issue of which language is to be used by the SUO (at least
not
in the first place). As far as I understand, what matters here is what
OpenCyc is talking about, not so much how it tells its tale. (BTW I take
that it's precisely why the CL efforts are so much worthy of interest.)
When
I try to compare Cyc and SUMO from this perspective and to a certain
extent,
it helps me to know my way around CycL and SKIF, but in the end this is
quite inessential, isn't it? Maybe that's because KIF and CycL are
buddies,
I'll give you that. Maybe it's because OpenCyc is basically currently
axiomless and SUMO also in demand in that respect...
So, I'm not clear about what you're saying here. Whether this
'CommonCycL'
thing is intended as a task for the CL people and your proposal to this
group (SUO) is that the motion be pruned of its references to CycML,
while
CycL continue to play its accessory role (this seems reasonnable to me),
or
what?
Although you are an active member of both the SUO and the CL groups, I
would
like to remind you that these are distinct entities with apparently
distinct
though not unrelated purposes. ;) To my (limited) understanding, the work
of
the CL group is not yet complete (or is it?) It seems odd to me to
request
from OpenCyc to use some formal framework under development in place of
its
cosy vernacular language. Even though, requesting that only the subset of
CycL captured by the CL framework be used in laying out OpenCyc's content
seems to me imprudent if not unfair as it seems to impose a clear
limitation
on the story that OpenCyc could thus tell. (I think the following is a
stretch but it's worth making the point.) Modality is paradigmatic here.
Remember John DeOlivera's oracular words: "All the vocab pages and more."
I
don't know if anything in this 'more' will require modality (actually I
hope
so!) But if it happens to be the case, 'CommonCycL' would not (purposely)
provide anything but the beginning of an adequate framework for the
intended
axiomatization. Extending CL with modality stuff is a laudable intent,
though once again this is at best on the to-do list, isn't it? My point
here, is that for the purpose of the SUO, using CycL for axiomatizing
OpenCyc's content is both natural (I don't see a good reason to object to
this) and inessential (I don't see a good reason to claim that it is part
of
the standard), so why don't you let it be? for now, that is to say.
One last point, I don't really catch your tough talk at the end of your
message. Who are these 'developers'? Once a starter document has been
adopted by this group, aren't all the contributing participants in this
groups its developers? Or did I miss something from the start?
Pierre
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