Re: SUO: Re: SUO Ballot with 2 Questions
At 09:27 AM 6/4/2003 -0400, John F. Sowa wrote:
>Mike,
>
>You are getting hung up on an irrelevant detail. The
>original version of motion #2 did not mention a registry:
>
>>But Patrick, this mechanism already exists within the
>> proposed upper ontologies. I'm not sure how or why
>> the registry provides a testbed that is not duplicated
>> within an existing standard, but it's just not true that
>> this registry proposal provides some capability for dealing
>> with inconsistent theories that would not exist without
>> the registry.
>
>The focus of the original proposal was to get three groups
>that had not been talking to one another to work together.
>Neither the SUMO nor the OpenCyc groups had any plans to
>do anything like to the IFF work on relating ontologies,
>detecting inconsistencies, and relating components to
>one another.
>
>Adam Pease and I spent several weeks arguing back and
>forth on the advantages of working with the IFF and
>OpenCyc groups. After all that talk, Adam finally
>admitted that maybe such a collaboration might not
>"block" his own plans for further SUMO development.
>
>The idea of the "registry" was recommended by Frank Farance
>and Matthew West, both of whom have had a great deal of
>experience with international collaborations on standards.
>They recognize that any major project needs some systematic
>way of recording who did what, when, where, why, and with
>what starting resources.
>
>That is the purpose of the registry: best practices
>for software development and organization applied to
>the task of ontology development and maintenance.
>
>If motion #2 fails, we will go back to status quo ante.
>If you recall, the SUO mailing list had been very quiet
>with very few emails per month. Then 5 things happened:
>
> 1. John De Oliveira submitted a motion to make OpenCyc
> a candidate for a standard.
>
> 2. Adam Pease resubmitted his motion from two years ago
> to make SUMO a candidate for a standard.
>
> 3. Then I suggested that we bring all three efforts -- IFF,
> OpenCyc, and SUMO -- into a collaboration instead of
> a competition.
>
> 4. John D. and the other Cyc members agreed that was
> preferable to having independent efforts.
>
> 5. But I had to spend long email debates with Adam before
> he was willing to join the coalition -- and then only
> on the condition that he could have his own separate
> motion.
>
>Now motion #2 proposes that we actually begin the work of
>a community effort rather than several isolated efforts.
>
>To put it bluntly, a vote against motion #2 is, in effect,
>a vote to dissolve the SUO Working Group. If it fails,
>SUMO will go back to being a Teknowledge effort with a few
>volunteers making comments. OpenCyc goes back to a CYc
>effort with a few volunteers making comments. And IFF goes
>back to a theoretical effort with no content to work with.
>
>If you can think of any better way to get the SUO group to
>work together, then please suggest it. Otherwise, you can
>vote for motion #2 or vote to dissolve the SUO.
John,
Please spare me the false dilemma and histrionics. Why would the creation of a registry generate some magical collaboration of the SUMO and OpenCyc efforts? How will the existence of a registry increase the number of people working on the respective efforts?
Secondly, even if it did make the contributors feel warm, fuzzy and collaborative, why is merger work between two candidates that have a great deal of conceptual overlap productive in efforts to generate a SUO? We could vote to spend time registering and merging all the ontologies listed at the Bateman URL that you gave, I just don't see the point if our desire is to create a good usable standard in a reasonable amount of time.
Mike
>John
>