Re: Brainstorming Idea: Set up an online testbed
Leo,
I strongly support work on aligning ontologies and on developing
new ontological resources. But there are several very important
points about the way current systems (and people) interoperate.
And no one has ever suggested any reason why future systems should
do anything that is different in any substantial way:
1. The major ontological agreements required among interoperating
agents (human or computer) depend on the tasks they do.
2. The required ontology for a given task can be derived by
analyzing the messages sent among the agents that are working
together on that task. No global alignment is required for
any aspects of their ontologies outside the specific task.
3. A given agent may communicate with different agents using
different task-oriented ontologies for different purposes.
4. Any agent X that is involved in more than one task may have
a global ontology that encompasses all of the tasks. But
X need only align its ontology with other agents on a task-
by-task basis.
This kind of task-oriented approach is much easier to deal with
than any approach that depends on global alignment.
I'm not against global alignment, but I strongly recommend that
we start with the much more manageable task-oriented ontologies.
John