John, and all of us; (01)
Thanks for the (as always) complete and interesting description of major
attempts to generate a useful ontology. You have a way of bringing
perspective to this work that is unmatched. (02)
One thing I noticed is that few of the projects you mentioned have been well
organized, though several have been well funded. (03)
The US has had many large and ill defined projects, and we have a history of
organized large scale teamwork (think NASA's moon shot, star wars research,
the Manhattan project, WWII, etc). First, a roadmap is developed with
major milestones. A schedule is set for accomplishing each milestone, and
very rough conceptual designs are produced for each portion. Major funding
and heavily staffed teams are charged with reaching each milestone. Then
there is a long and winding path from the conceptual beginning to a physical
end. The end is nearly always slightly different than we expected, but not
massively so. (04)
What has so far stopped the US and our partners from using this approach for
ontology development? I think the answer is that the value of ontology
development hasn't been demonstrated properly. (05)
If the value of an ontology standard could be clearly demonstrated, then the
same project organization methods could be sold to congress, funded, and
given the same kind of attention as the other major projects. Then some
practically useful results could be enjoyed. (06)
If we all agree, then we should stop debating these (agreed important)
details and start thinking of a major national value that most of congress
can agree on. That seems to be the best way for us to make progress on this
topic. (07)
So far, the only value we have agreed on is that databases could be
integrated if we only had ontologies. Someone tossed a 100B dollar cost
estimate into the porridge a few days ago. 100B is not very large, as
congressional budgets go. But I'm skeptical whether the value of such a
project is anywhere near 100B. In fact, I am not aware of any databases
that could be integrated to yield a 1B result at this time. (08)
Admittedly, science oriented people like ourselves think the challenge and
the notion of ontology based AI is worth pursuing. But history says that
scientists haven't produced successful large scale projects. Instead, a few
scientists working on small concepts have produced the best scientific
results. (Think Newton, Einstein, Turing, Von Neumann, etc). But that
isn't what appears to be needed in ontology engineering. We can debate
technical issues - but that won't produce widely subscribed results. (09)
I think we should focus on the why, the value, and the project level
concepts of ontology engineering. (010)
-Rich (011)
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com (012)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 12:50 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Next steps in using ontologies as standards (013)
Rich, (014)
That is a very good question: (015)
> Is our work producing benefits after all these years?
> Positive examples would be useful to discuss before we
> self destruct on these issues. (016)
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. (017)
There were three large projects that were started in the 1980s: (018)
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. (019)
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. (020)
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. (021)
There were also projects that centered around mailing lists such
as this one. The archives for all of them are on the WWW. (022)
- 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. (023)
http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/email-archives/srkb.index.html (024)
- 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. (025)
http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/onto-std/ (026)
- 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. (027)
http://suo.ieee.org/ (028)
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, (029)
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. (030)
In 1787, Kant defined his 12 upper-level categories and made
the following pronouncement: (031)
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. (032)
222 years later, we're still waiting for somebody to complete
this easy task. (033)
If anyone wants to try, I wish them luck. (034)
John (035)
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