RE: SUO: Motion #1 fails; Motion #2 passes
Dear John,
I agree with you that it is more significant that your motion passed
than that Adam's might have. However, I expect Bob to appeal the result.
This will give the benefit of finally knowing how our votes are counted,
since Adam conveniently managed to attract just the right number of
votes for it still to be contentious (congratulations Adam :-( ).
This need not detract us from moving forward in practice technically.
Matthew West
Principal Consultant
Shell Information Technology International Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Other Tel: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.west@shell.com
Internet: http://www.shell.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John F. Sowa [mailto:sowa@bestweb.net]
> Sent: 15 June 2003 06:20
> To: jim.s3@juno.com
> Cc: skydog@pacbell.net; cassidy@micra.com;
> standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> Subject: Re: SUO: Motion #1 fails; Motion #2 passes
>
>
>
> Bob and Jim,
>
> I sympathize with Bob's desire to get a definitive
> answer to the question of what proportion of the
> vote is considered a winning margin.
>
> But in the present case, I believe that the vote
> in favor of motion #2 makes the question of whether
> motion #1 passed or failed irrelevant.
>
> Since motion #2 explicitly mentioned OpenCyc and SUMO
> as documents to be considered in the development of
> a standard, both of them are on an equal footing in
> being considered as starting resources.
>
> But as the discussion has shown, the SUO Working Group
> is very far from reaching a consensus on what a standard
> should look like, how many years it should take to get one,
> how much, if any, of the original starting documents should
> be included in the final result, and how much, if any, of
> the other resources should be included.
>
> Given all this uncertainty, we can still conclude from
> the vote that a majority (46 out of 71) of the SUO voting
> members believe that
>
> 1. SUMO, OpenCyc, and other sources are worthy of being
> considered as starting content to be considered in
> the development of an IEEE standard.
>
> 2. IFF is an important source of methodology and techniques
> for relating the starting content sources to one another
> and to other content that may become available.
>
> 3. An ontology registry, organized as a generalization
> hierarchy together with metadata about the content,
> can be an important tool for assisting the development
> of an ontology, showing the relationship of the modules
> to one another, and giving some indication of the merit
> of any of the modules in the registry.
>
> 4. But there are still many unresolved questions about
> how much, if any, of the starting sources would remain
> in a final proposed draft IEEE standard upper ontology.
>
> 5. And there are still many unresolved questions about how
> much of the IFF theory will prove to be useful.
>
> 6. And the estimated time to develop a proposed draft SUO
> is somewhere between "several years" and "never".
>
> In order to keep the estimated time to something closer
> to the lower limit, I suggest that we not waste time in
> debating whether the vote on question #1 was "irrelevant",
> "marginally relevant", or "possibly significant".
>
> John Sowa
>
>