Hi Steve,
I won’t
be able to participate in the Jan 3 call, I have a conflict.
For the next
ontology summit I would like to once again see if there is a path we can take
to get agreement on some common foundation ontology. The first step is to identify
some significant part of the ontology community that will make a serious proposal
to a funding agency to support the efforts of an effective cross-section of the
community of those who have worked on foundation ontologies and those who are
building applications that require the reasoning capabilities that a FOL-based ontology
can provide. I think it would be particularly helpful to have
representation from those who are exploring the use of ontologies for natural
language understanding in such a project. We have discussed this issue
before, and at this time it would probably take over 5 million to support a
basic effort of that kind. To get that kind of money we will need more of
a consensus than has been visible up to now. But we have learned a
lot in the past five years, and the time may be ripe for another attempt.
The tactic
I now think may have the best chance of moving forward is to structure the
common foundation ontology as a ‘conceptual defining vocabulary’
that will have all the primitive concept representations necessary to create ontologies
in any specialized area, with each element in each domain ontology specified as
a combination of the primitive elements. That’s the goal, and it
will be approached incrementally over time as the foundation ontology expands
to meet the needs of new applications. By viewing the foundation ontology
in this way, I think it will be possible to keep the size at a level
where it will not be too difficult to master. Wherever there is some disagreement
on how to represent some particular idea, the disagreeing parties effort could focus
on describing the differences in terms of formal representations –
and the concept representations they agree on to describe the differences would
then be candidates for inclusion in the foundation ontology, with the different
views pushed out into extensions (or, if one prefers, different dependent
ontologies in a “lattice of ontologies”). This tactic
may increase the ability to agree on the most fundamental concept
representations.
The problem of
interoperability is still facing us, and from the perspective of getting
semantic interoperability at a level that can support automated decisions in a
mission-critical application, I don’t perceive any significant progress
outside of the limited communities that each have fixed on some common upper
ontology. I think we can do better to move toward a critical mass that
attracts vendors of utilities and applications. As a scientific/engineering
community it may be appropriate for us to feel an obligation to seriously
explore all the possible ways to improve the utility of our ontologies.
My suggestion is to explore the “conceptual defining vocabulary”
tactic, and I hope we can have at least a few hour session at the Ontology
Summit (or perhaps at FOIS, or both) for discussing that .
If there is anyone
else interested in exploring this approach, we can start discussions in this
forum to identify the issues in this approach that need to be clarified, so
that some portion of our community might be able to come to a consensus on
whether or not to make a formal funding proposal.
Meanwhile, have
yourselves a Merry Little Christmas.
Pat
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Peter F
Brown
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2007 9:54 AM
To: ray@xxxxxxxx
Cc: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Start thinking about the 2008 Ontology
Summit
Hi Steve:
I look forward to it,
and hope to join the call on Jan 3 and submit some ideas then or before…
As regards the dates,
you might want to take account of the fact that OASIS have their AGM, Symposium
and Board meeting in Santa Clara during the week 28 April to 2 May, so the
Mon/Tue following would be ideal, at least for me who will be involved in all
three, but also many potential participants who may well be at the Symposium at
least.
That said, I know
from experience that trying to find available time windows is a
nightmare….
Regards,
Peter
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steve Ray
Sent: 21 December 2007 15:45
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: [ontolog-forum] Start thinking about the 2008 Ontology Summit
As we have for the past two years, we are planning on
holding a face-to-face meeting of the ontology community at NIST in the spring
of 2008. We are ironing out some logistic details, but it is looking like a
likely date is late April.
The purpose of this email is to solicit ideas for the topic
we tackle this year, and then undertake an online discussion culminating in the
meeting. One possibility is to arrive at a resolution by the community to
support an online ontology repository somewhere. This topic is going to be
discussed anyway at the January 3rd Ontolog Forum conference call
– you may want to call in. There are numerous other possibilities for the
Ontology Summit – please submit your favorites.
Steven
R. Ray, Chief
Manufacturing
Systems Integration Division
National
Institute of Standards & Technology
Phone:
(301) 975-3524
Fax:
(301) 258-9749
Email: ray@xxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.nist.gov/msid