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Re: [ontolog-forum] Next steps in using ontologies as standards

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Ron Wheeler <rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:23:20 -0500
Message-id: <49779248.6010403@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
I added this short history lesson to the wiki.    (01)

Ron    (02)

J
ohn F. Sowa wrote:
> Rich,
>
> That is a very good question:
>
>  > Is our work producing benefits after all these years?
>  > Positive examples would be useful to discuss before we
>  > self destruct on these issues.
>
> We have very few positive examples, but lots of negative ones.
> Since the definition of an expert is "somebody who knows
> everything that doesn't work," we have lots of experts.
>
> There were three large projects that were started in the 1980s:
>
>   1. Cyc began in 1984, soaked up about 70 million dollars of
>      research funding by about 2004, and still takes in more
>      money from research grants than income from applications.
>
>   2. The Japan Electronic Dictionary Project (EDR) began in the
>      late 1980s, spent quite a few billion yen to define 410,000
>      concepts with mappings to English and Japanese, was liquidated
>      in 2002, but still has a few people around to collect $20K
>      from the few people who are willing to pay for their product.
>
>   3. WordNet was supported by research grants to George Miller and
>      his group at Princeton.  This is the most widely used product,
>      largely because the price is right -- free.
>
> There were also projects that centered around mailing lists such
> as this one.  The archives for all of them are on the WWW.
>
>   - The Shared Reusable Knowledge Base (SRKB) project was started in
>     1991 by the Stanford Knowledge Systems Lab with all the usual
>     suspects.  Various things came out of it such as reports, some
>     miscellaneous software, and the KIF (Knowledge Interchange
>     Format).  Mike Genesereth (the primary author of the KIF report)
>     and I collaborated with the X3H4 committee to develop parallel
>     ANSI standards for KIF and conceptual graphs.  After many fits
>     and (re)starts, this project finally led to the ISO standard
>     for Common Logic 16 years later.
>
>     http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/email-archives/srkb.index.html
>
>   - The Ad Hoc ANSI Committee (a working group of X3T2) met for a
>     few years in the late 1990s.  Klaus Tschirra, one of the five
>     original founders of SAP, attended one of the meetings and
>     invited a bunch of the participants to a one-week workshop in
>     Heidelberg in 1998 to develop a foundation for a common ontology.
>
>     http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/onto-std/
>
>   - The IEEE working group on a Standard Upper Ontology was
>     started in 2000 and still exists as an inactive email list.
>     Some things that came out of that project include SUMO and IFF.
>
>     http://suo.ieee.org/
>
> There were also projects to develop universal languages for
> logic and ontology in the 17th and 18th centuries.  An example
> is Leibniz's Universal Characteristic, which encoded primitive
> concepts as prime numbers and compound concepts as products of
> primes.  Many other prominent philosophers were involved, among
> them, Descartes, Kant, and many lesser lights.  As Leibniz said,
>
>     The art of ranking things in genera and species is of no
>     small importance and very much assists our judgment as well
>     as our memory. You know how much it matters in botany, not
>     to mention animals and other substances, or again moral and
>     notional entities as some call them. Order largely depends
>     on it, and many good authors write in such a way that their
>     whole account could be divided and subdivided according to
>     a procedure related to genera and species. This helps one
>     not merely to retain things, but also to find them.  And
>     those who have laid out all sorts of notions under certain
>     headings or categories have done something very useful.
>
> In 1787, Kant defined his 12 upper-level categories and made
> the following pronouncement:
>
>     If one has the original and primitive concepts, it is easy to
>     add the derivative and subsidiary, and thus give a complete
>     picture of the family tree of the pure understanding. Since
>     at present, I am concerned not with the completeness of the
>     system, but only with the principles to be followed, I leave
>     this supplementary work for another occasion.  It can easily
>     be carried out with the aid of the ontological manuals.
>
> 222 years later, we're still waiting for somebody to complete
> this easy task.
>
> If anyone wants to try, I wish them luck.
>
> John
>
>  
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>
>       (03)


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