Azamat,
Re:
The
proposal sounds sensible in many respects.
Ø But the real fact is
that the project of Standard Ontology is not only a historically unique
scientific and engineering enterprise, but also too extensive, both in its
scale of knowledge, funding stakeholders and research participants.
Thus it will be expensive,
The Foundation Ontology that I think will serve adequately for semantic
interoperability does not have to have representations of many specialized
things in it, it only needs representations of the fundamental concepts that will
allow logical descriptions of the specialized things. Therefore it will not be
overly large, and may be under 10,000 elements. If viewed as a “domain
ontology”, its domain is to *translate* among differing ontological
representations.
The estimated cost, $30M, may be low, but that is not because of the size of
the ontology required, but the number of participants needed to be sure that
the FO can translate among the alternative representations that the
participants may want for their local use. In addition, it is intended that
certain utilities and applications be created as part of the project, and that
programming effort may take up more than half of the funding.
The cost figure would be revised after a group of potential participants had
discussed the project to flesh out details.
[[AA] PS: In
fact, the most fundamental things have been achieved without a significant
commitment of money; take
the most extensive knowledge project, Wikipedia, bare enthusiasm to kick
off and 6m operating costs yearly.
Actually, Wikipedia was started by an infusion of money from its
founder, though I am not sure how much that was, and although it is a largely
volunteer project, it does, as you note, have an annual budget of nontrivial
size. I would hope that eventually, extensions to the FO would be created that
specify Wikipedia-like knowledge in terms of the FO, but they might be
maintained in a distributed collections of local sites.
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 Azamat
Sent: Monday, February 16, 2009 1:03 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] standard ontology
On
Monday, February 16, 2009 6:00 PM, Patrick wrote:
The
project proposal I have been discussing in bits and pieces on this forum is
described in a bit more detail below. Until we can identify a possible
source of funding, I imagine that this will merely be the subject of endless
debate. Our experience of the past fifteen years with upper ontologies is
that nothing serious happens without a significant commitment of money.
The
proposal sounds sensible in many respects.
But
the real fact is that the project of Standard Ontology is not only a
historically unique scientific and engineering enterprise, but also too
extensive, both in its scale of knowledge, funding stakeholders and
research participants. Thus it will be expensive, the figures mentioned
are too small, as i said the smaller ontology groups, usually without any
delivery a promised product, are getting much more, about $20m.
As
the international stakeholders can go European Research Council, NSF,
UN (Classification Sections).
Given
that the public ontology awareness is still low, it is reasonable to
use more telling words (as "marketing" adjustments). Instead of
Standard Ontolology or Foundation Ontology, something like:
Human
Knowledge Standards;
Global
Knowledge Organization System;
Universal
Knowledge Base;
Entity
Classification Standards;
RDFreal
(Reality Description Framework), etc.
PS: In
fact, the most fundamental things have been achieved without a significant
commitment of money; take
the most extensive knowledge project, Wikipedia, bare enthusiasm to kick
off and 6m operating costs yearly.