+1 (01)
At 5:21 PM -0500 5/2/07, Christopher Menzel wrote:
>On May 2, 2007, at 4:08 PM, Adam Pease wrote:
>> ...
>> Rather than just imagining some fatal flaw exists, I think it's
>> incumbent on those who claim a common upper ontology is impossible to
>> give at least one example, as a logical proof, of such a flaw.
>
>I agree with that, Adam. My own expression of skepticism in an
>earlier post was not rooted in the idea that there is a fatal flaw in
>the idea of a reasonably comprehensive upper ontology. To the
>contrary, I don't see any reason at all why there couldn't be one;
>indeed it seems clear that there already are several candidates. I
>am simply skeptical of two things: (1) Whether there is any coherent
>sense in which such an on ontology could ever function as any sort of
>"medium" for supporting general interoperability (which is what the
>person from NASA seemed to be advocating) and (2) even if the answer
>to (1) is "yes", I am skeptical of whether such an approach would
>have any advantage over a straightforward "federated" approach on
>which distinct ontologies are integrated in a more piecemeal fashion;
>I am, that is, skeptical of the extent to which an upper ontology is
>needed to *support* interoperability.
>
>That said, having in fact authored a small piece of the SUMO myself,
>as you well know :-) , I am *not* of the opinion that the
>construction of these comprehensive upper ontologies is wasted
>effort. For several of the existing candidates, SUMO in particular,
>offer very nice modular axiomatizations of a wide variety of
>conceptual and empirical domains, from class theory to time to
>material objects. Even if a comprehensive upper ontology as a whole
>might not be particularly useful for interoperability, many of its
>various pieces could definitely serve as the axiomatic underpinnings
>of a variety of more specialized ontologies. So I'm all for
>continuing their developments.
>
>-chris
>
>
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