[topicmapmail] SUMO

[Murray Altheim]

Dan Corwin wrote:
>>* Murray Altheim
> 
> 
>>| 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".
> 
> 
> * Lars Marius Garshol
>  
> 
>>Hmmmm. Isn't what you are describing topic maps? Sure, topic maps
>>include some PSIs for class/instance and so on, but you don't have to
>>use them. I guess what I'm asking is how your meta-ontology language
>>would be different from topic maps. Would it be a set of PSIs? If so,
>>what kinds of things were you thinking of putting in there?
> 
> 
> Topic maps do seem an excellent beginning - the established
> structural definitions of topics and especially associations 
> are extremely expressive, flexible, useful building blocks,
> and more available and understandable today than RDF is.
> 
> But today, TMs are too flexible to be an ontology language.  
> I can use them one way; you can use them differently.  We can
> both be right, and both be happy individually with our apps.
> 
> But those apps won't exchange data well unless we have agreed 
> on the details of how to model relationships, structures, parts,
> causality, goodness, time, space, and similar KR basics - what 
> Murray called "universals" (at least as I understood him).
[...]

I think we're basically on the same page, and perhaps have the same
vision in mind too. What I've been trying to do over the past two
years is figure out the fundamental logical basis for such an "upper"
ontology, so that it has at its foundation a reasonable (and I mean
"able to be reasoned upon") core. I've looked at Cyc, SUMO and a few
other systems, and there isn't an agreement that is obvious. In the
SCL activity, there's Cyc and SUMO people watching, but I'm not yet
convinced that there's going to be any real unification. Sort of like
the Israelis and Palestinians, both sides have a lot of territory
stakes to lose.

I kinda hold out hope that the CL/SCL work will bear some fruit, and
I've agitated quite a lot to make sure that all the fundamental
concepts in SCL be given PSIs. I *think* Pat Hayes, John Sowa and
the others understand where I'm coming from, even if they don't share
many of the same goals. If SCL, Cyc, SUMO, etc. all have PSI identifiers
for each of their concepts, at least we can map the differences where
they exist.

As I alluded to in one of my previous messages, my enthusiasm for TMs
comes in part from the belief that the semantics of TMs won't
necessarily intrude upon the semantics of the ontologies themselves,
that it's a *relatively* semantic-neutral modeling tool.

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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