[topicmapmail] SUMO

[Murray Altheim]

Dan Corwin wrote:
[...]
> IEEE is calling the question on supporting SUMO - definitely not
> a lightweight model - but one which is wide open, soundly based
> in computational lexicography, and a prime candidate for "the"
> top level web ontology.  It's even (nearly?) in PSIs, at ...
> 
> http://ontology.teknowledge.com:8080/rsigma/SKB.jsp?req=SC&skb=SUMO&id=80

There are a number of candidates for upper ontologies, and of course
among them is SUMO. What I'm more trying to get at is a "meta-ontology"
language, just the bare-bones of what is used to create something like
SUMO. I'm not sure how bare that can be, and as I've said, I have
quite a lot of skepticism that any level of commitment can be in any
way considered "universal". Even something so "simple" as what
constitutes a "class", "instance", "superclass", "subclass", i.e.,
the basics we now have in XTM 1.0 can't be considered universal, as
there are varying definitions of these things.

I had thought that perhaps dropping down into FOL as some fundamental
core might work, but having spent some time with the SCL folks I'm
realizing that there's just as much religion there as anywhere else.
(funny how one can be deluded into thinking there's somewhere an
island of objectivity, even with my training as a Taoist... duh).

One has to choose fundamentals somewhere, so I'm looking at issues
such as whether an ontology must be rooted or not (e.g., #$Thing in
Cyc), how to structure the *truly* upper portion of an ontology,
such as the top dozen concepts, etc., the more minimal, one might
think the less to argue about, except that just as in religion or
politics, the closer to the fundamentals one gets, the closer one
is to fundamentalism, and people will argue till they're blue over
the existence of God, whether FOL can express everything in the
universe, intensionality vs. extensionality, etc.

[Like everything else, a big run-on sentence.]

BTW, there are certainly those who would say that SUMO's "sound basis"
is flawed. It's no more universal than anything else; it's just the
result of an IEEE effort that had a lot of participation from people
who agreed with the goal and the approach. That wasn't a consensus of
the ontological engineering community by any stretch.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                  <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK

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