Re: [KIF] Re: SUO: OpenCyc Motion
Pierluigi,
I mostly agree with you on the issues, and I believe that it should be
possible to formulate a motion that will get favorable vote. Because
of the legalities that have been raised, the simplest way to revise
the motion would be for you, as the official proposer, to retract the
previous motion and submit a revised motion.
My suggestion is that the revised motion should be separated into
two motions that can be voted on independently:
1. A proposal to adopt the OpenCyc ontology as a candidate for
an IEEE standard. I would like to see some wording in that
motion that would indicate a willingness to collaborate with
the developers of the other two candidates, SUMO and IFF, in
order to work toward a convergence that incorporates the best
features of all three.
2. A proposal to work with the CL committee that is already
standardizing KIF, CGs, and the infix notation for predicate
calculus to determine:
a) Whether CycL, in its present form, can be defined within
the current CL semantic framework.
b) Whether there are features in CycL that would require
some extensions to the CL framework.
c) Whether some suitably extended version of CL could accommodate
either the present version of CycL or some suitably modified
version that would be adequate to specify the OpenCyc ontology.
The goal of this study would be to formalize CycL in terms of
the CL semantics or some appropriate extension to CL.
The third point about CycML might be appropriate for a third motion,
but I believe it should be postponed until more information has been
provided to the SUO list about CycML and its intended use.
Following is part of my previous note with your comments:
JS> Recommendation: I propose that the subset of CycL required to
> express the OpenCyc ontology be standardized by the same ISO process
> that is developing the CL standard. That would be the fastest way
> to develop a standard for CycL (or some subset thereof), and it would
> ensure complete interoperability between that version of CycL and
> every other notation included in the CL standard: KIF, CGs, and
> infix predicate calculus.
PM> I am all in favor of taking this into consideration and doing the
> work you propose (it's work that I generally enjoy doing [:)] , but
> I also believe that it should not be impossible to at least consider
> as potential standards languages that have additional expressive or
> inferential power. So, imho, you are perfectly free to propose that
> a standard KRL should be one that doesn't exceed the "minimal KRL
> standard" as specified by CL, but this proposal in itself would seem
> to me a matter of some debate, and as such should be not be considered
> at this stage as grounds for rejecting any candidate potentially
> exceeding this avowed "standard."
I'm not sure that CycL, in its current form, does exceed what can be
defined within the CL framework. But if it does, I think that would be
an excellent reason for determining what extensions are necessary in CL
to support CycL. I believe that such work would be valuable for both
CycL and the CL framework. Mike Genesereth, I, and other people had
discussed this possibility with Doug Lenat and other people in the Cyc
group from time to time. The idea was always considered a potentially
useful thing to do, but no one actually allocated the time to do it.
Perhaps now would be the time.
I am also sending this note to the CL committee (which still has the
"KIF" address).
John Sowa