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DOLCE
(a Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and CognitiveEngineering) has a clear
cognitive bias, in the sense that it aims at capturing theontological categories underlying natural language and human commonsense.
OpenCyc:
OPENCYC
ontology appears to be deeply affected by cognitive assumptions, since itscategories try to capture naïve conceptions of the real world, that is, as we said above, the
human fund of common sense knowledge.
SUMO:
Because of its characteristic merging of different upper level ontologies, SUMO is actually
not influenced by a specific theoretical approach, rather it tends to take from various
ontological proposals those general categories which seem to be largely shared by the
computer science community.
Given your interest in avoiding biases in the construction of an SUO, it seems you ought to be receptive to the SUMO approach. Are you?
Erik
Jon and Julian,
You're both right. Jon's statement is true of any monolithic
ontology, such as SUMO. Julian's requirements can be and are
being supported by Cyc -- and they must be supported by any SUO
we may develop.
>JA: ... but there is just no way of mushing togther a research
>oriented ontology with a general info, person in the street, journalistic
>ontology, without generating more mush, and there is no way of deriving
>scientific knowledge from popular (mis-)conceptions without radically
>changing common sense concepts in the process.
Cyc supports both popular and scientific world views by using
modules, which they call "microtheories". "Fairy tale"
examples include their microtheories on vampires and Greek
mythology (which are necessary for understanding references
in many texts, both popular and scientific).
But an even better example is their use of microtheories to
accommodate a dialog between a physician and a patient, who
must communicate to solve a problem, but who have radically
different terminology and concepts for characterizing the case.
Such examples occur in every branch of science and engineering
when the "gear heads" have to talk to the people who pay the
bills. They also occur in discussions between scientists who
have different opinions and hypotheses about the same data.
To handle such mismatches, Cyc has defined 6,000 microtheories,
and they have the mechanisms for dynamically creating new ones
during a single conversation (or even a single sentence).
Following is Julian's response, which I completely agree with.
We might not need 6,000 microtheories in the SUO, but we must
support the mechanisms for creating them and using them. And
I believe that we will need such mechanisms even if we only had
"scientific" concepts in the ontology -- because scientists
change their opinions about fundamental issues much more often
than "the man on the Clapham omnibus."
John Sowa
_______________________________________________________________
JF>... an SUO framework should allow the following to be represented:
>
>"the sun goes round the earth" (man on the Clapham omnibus)
>"the earth goes round the sun" (popular science)
>"the movement of the earth is determined by the gravitational attraction of
other bodies, particular massive bodies within the solar system ..." (high school
science)
>...
>continuing to
>...
>(full exposition of gravitational theory as applied to celestial bodies)
>
>as long as these are not treated as contextually equivalent assertions/theories
(which they would if the ontologies in which each statement occurs were to be
"mushed together"). Further, the fra! mework should allow the bases for each
of these assertions to be formalized as well as the relationships among them.