===================================================================
FoundationOntologyProject
Proposal for a Collaborative Effort to Create a Common
Foundation Ontology and a Community of Users
The goal is to create an open-source common Foundation
Ontology (FO) that is used by some substantial community of users who will
test it in practical applications and share their lessons and results.
Such a common FO should have eventually enough users to motivate third-party
developers to create utilities to make it easier to use, and applications that
demonstrate its utility. To accomplish this, it is proposed that a
collaborative project be organized with about 100 funded
participants.
Motivation:
Based on the experience of the past 15 years of discussion
and effort to develop a common foundation ontology (often referred to as a
common ?upper ontology?), the problems encountered appear to
be:
(1) no one view of the foundation ontology elements is
satisfactory to a majority of ontology developers
(2) the FOs thus far developed have each reflected only one
viewpoint on ontology structure, out of many possible views
(3) no impressive **publicly observable** practical
applications have been developed to provide motivation to learn any of the
existing foundation ontologies
(4) learning how to use existing foundation ontologies is
time-consuming; in the absence of strong motivation (such as impressive
applications), few are willing to undertake the effort
(5) developing impressive applications for an ontology
(those that go beyond data in ? data out demonstrations) is very
time-consuming ? even more so than developing the FO itself. This is one
reason why Cycorp has not fielded an impressive online demo of the use of
their ontology.
(6) it is likely that impressive demonstration applications
such as Natural Language understanding will require the coordinated
collaborative efforts of many developers, but that has been inhibited by the
absence of widespread agreement on a foundation ontology as the basis for such
an effort, and by the current NL focus on corpus-based statistical
methods.
The solution appears to be to create a common FO by the
efforts of a large collaborative team that will also form a user community
that can evolve the FO and learn from each other?s efforts. Based on
past experience, this is likely to require about 100 participants representing
at least 50 separate teams of developers or users of ontologies. The
effort required to create such an ontology is considerable, and adequate
funding (average ½ of full-time) for each participant will be required.
The project is likely to extend over three years, and funding for such a
project is likely to require at least 10 million dollars per year (average
100K/yr per participant).
The success of such a project will depend on prior
agreement concerning the goals, timetable, and process by which the project
will be conducted. The anticipate phasing is:
(1) preliminary on-line discussion, after some commitment
of funding is obtained, so that participants can be solicited and identified,
and can get acquainted with each others? views and goals for the
project. On this basis, they will make their decision whether or not to
participate: No funding will be required for this discussion, but the
topic is not likely to be taken seriously unless some probable source of
funding has been identified and has made a tentative
commitment.
(2) an in-person meeting of a preliminary group of funded
participants, for one or two weeks, to prepare a formal set of goals,
timetable, and procedural rules. At this point some potential
participants may decide not to participate in the full project. Travel
funding will be needed for this meeting.
If there are not at least 50 participants who agree
to the conditions of funding (see below), the project will not be
funded. This is to guarantee that there is in fact a substantial
community of users that result from the project. Generating a
community of users is one of the main goals of the project.
(3) The main project will consist of development of the FO
containing representations of fundamental elements satisfactory to each of the
participants, allowing alternatives, and providing translation axioms or
procedures. In parallel, utilities to help make the FO easy to use, and
applications to demonstrate its use will be developed. It is
anticipated that the third year of the project will be devoted mostly to
testing the utilities and applications, with modifications of the FO made to
supply any missing functionality.
The goals, timetable, and process will be finalized in a
preliminary meeting of the participants, taking perhaps one or two weeks after
preliminary online discussions have acquainted the participants with each
others? views and individual goals for their participation.
An initial set of proposals for the goals and process might
be the following. The development consortium will decide which if any of
these to adopt, and which to add.
(1) The distinctive and indispensable goal for the FO will
be to serve as a means to *translate* among the local representations
(terminology and format) of all of the participants, so that each individual
can use his/her own preferred local representation and still interoperate
accurately with the others. A second important function of the FO
is serve as the basic set of ontology elements with which the meanings
of domain ontology elements can be described (this function is served by
existing FOs). For both of these functions, the FO should have an
adequate inventory of fundamental concept representations to both create new
specialized ontology elements and to translate among the local representations
of the participants.
(2) The ontology and any utilities develop by the project
will be open-source and open to suggestions from any interested party. A
web site indicating the current state of development of the components of the
project will be maintained so that suggestions can be received from any party
with an interest in the effort.
(3) setting and adhering to a timetable for development
will be essential. For this reason it is not anticipated that consensus
will be reached on most of the controversial issues, and when necessary
disagreements will be resolved by a quick vote of the executive committee
(which may be the whole set of participants, or a subset selected by the
whole). Those who are aware (based on prior discussion) that their
own views will not prevail in such a vote may choose not to participate, or
may drop out after participating for some time.
(4) the need for resolution of disagreements will be
mitigated by allowing the inclusion of all desired ontology elements from any
participant. Those elements that are logically consistent (after
translation by bridging axioms or translation functions) can be included
in the base FO, and those that are logically inconsistent will be included in
one or more extensions. The set of base FO and extensions may form a
?lattice of theories? or a simple hierarchy, as decided by the executive
committee. Importantly, *no* participant can veto the inclusion of
an element from some other participant. If it occurs that at least one
of two or more logically inconsistent representations must be included in the
base FO, a choice of *which one* to include will have to be made by
vote, to keep the base FO logically consistent.
(5) as a condition of funding, participants will agree to
test the FO in at least one application, and report to the consortium
regarding its performance and suitability in that application; if another
ontology is also tested in that application, a comparison of the performance
of the two ontologies will be reported, with an evaluation of the reason for
the difference, and any improvements that may be needed for the common
FO. Participants that drop out after less than two years may not be held
to this obligation. Funded participants are allowed and encouraged to
collaborate on developing applications in fulfillment of this condition.
There may also be non-funded participants, who will not be under any
obligation to report their use of the FO. Whether non-funded
participants will have any voting rights for resolving disagreements will be
decided by the funded participants.
(6) together with the FO, it will be necessary to develop
utilities to make the resulting product easier to use. (a) One utility
will be a program to extract from the base FO a subontology that contains only
those elements required for a particular application. For example, since
the base FO will have alternative representations of some concepts, the
extraction utility will usually extract only one view, to maximize
computational efficiency. The full set of alternate views in the FO will
be required only to *translate* among the alternative views when information
transfer is desired between systems linked to the FO. By
supporting extraction of subontologies from the FO, the problem of
computational complexity will be minimized.
(b) another utility will consist of a set of translation
utilities that can translate assertions from one alternative view (local
representation) to another;
(c) another utility will be a natural-language
interface that can both search for concepts described using a controlled
subset of English, and automatically translate concept specifications from
English into the logical representation. The controlled English
vocabulary will be maintained as a component of the NL utility, and can be
expanded as needed to make use of the FO easier by allowing more natural
descriptions of the meanings of new elements.
(7) At least two demonstration applications need to
be developed along with the FO, to illustrate its use. One of those
applications should be a natural-language understanding program, which will
expand on the NL interface utility developed, to include interpretation of
text (by conversion to the logical specifications of the FO) in at least one
specialized domain, and support question answering about any text
interpreted.