SUO: Vote on SUO ballot
Dear Jim,
I vote NO on question #1,
and YES on question #2.
I vote NO on SUMO since I believe that the main reservations I
expressed in the past (lack of methodology, combination of different
sources without adequate analysis of the underlying ontological
choices, high risk of inconsistencies, etc.) are still valid.
I vote YES on John Sowa's proposal because I believe it can be a
reasonable starting point for seriously comparing different
ontological proposals. I noticed however that the latest formulation
does not foresee considering other proposals besides IFF, OpenCYC and
SUMO, despite the discussion on this point (well, I followed it only
very cursory). I hope there will be space in the future to consider
other proposals, and in particular the DOLCE ontology
http://wonderweb.semanticweb.org/deliverables/D17.shtml
that various people have mentioned already.
Moreover, I hope it will be possible to be possible to compare the
various theories John mentions in his proposal in terms of their
different ontological choices, not just in terms of simple
generalization/specialization hierarchies. The interesting thing is
to understand why and where two theories are different, and what are
the consequences of the different positions. This is the approach we
are pursuing with the WonderWeb foundational ontology library.
More comments on DOLCE and the WonderWeb project in the next message.
Cheers,
Nicola
P.S.: Keep in mind that my reaction time to SUO messages is LONG.
Sorry for that.
--
Nicola Guarino
Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA), ISTC-CNR
Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies
National Research Council
Via Solteri, 38
I-38100 Trento
phone: +39 0461 402088
fax: +39 0461/435344
email: Nicola.Guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it
http://ontology.ip.rm.cnr.it
Provisional mirror site: http://www.isib.cnr.it/infor/ontology/ontology.html