Ed, (01)
A few comments to clarify some of the issues: (02)
EB> John Sowa will doubtless tell us that Cyc -- the mysterious
> and powerful Oz -- has seen all of this and conquered it (if
> only they could tell us). (03)
I have followed the Cyc project for years, but I have no vested
interest in either promoting Cyc or creating an alternative to it.
And I never said that they "conquered" the problems. On the
contrary, I repeatedly noted that Cyc has fallen very far short
of the goals that Lenat proclaimed 25 years ago. (04)
But I keep raising Cyc as a prime example of the kind of large
scale ontology effort that many people have been advocating.
And I always ask one very annoying question: (05)
If Cyc has not already solved problem X with their ontology,
what makes you think that your proposed ontology will solve X? (06)
If the people who propose a new ontology project cannot give
a coherent answer to that question, I have very serious doubts
about their competence and their chances of success. (07)
EB> What Amanda proposes is that we get some real experience using
> ontologies in more than the biomedical and intelligence communities
> before we leap to the conclusion that some particular Gedanken
> experiment will be useful in solving arbitrary unknown problems. (08)
If you noticed, Amanda began her note with an endorsement of my
proposed methodology: (09)
AV> Your remarks about the *methodology* at the heart of useful
> upper ontology get at one aspect of this problematic framing.
> Thanks for articulating it just so. (010)
Then she added further observations, which I strongly agreed with.
For the methodology, see my earlier note (excerpt below). (011)
John (012)
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] ISO merged ontology effort "MCO"
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 11:11:34 -0400
From: John F. Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> (013)
[Multiple comments deleted.] (014)
I'd like to emphasize that I proposed the KR ontology as an
*example* of how an ontology can be derived by a systematic
methodology: (015)
1. Start with fundamental distinctions, not categories. (016)
2. Each distinction generates a pair (for a binary distinction)
or a triplet (for a ternary distinction) of basic features. (017)
3. Leibniz's methodology derives all possible combinations of
those features, which include many unnamed categories. Other
methodologies (such as FCA) create lattices that minimize
the number of unnamed categories. (018)
4. If more categories and distinctions are added to the list,
a new lattice can be derived that subsumes the earlier
lattice as a proper subset. (019)
As an example of such a methodology with open-source software,
I suggest Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). See the FCA home page: (020)
http://www.upriss.org.uk/fca/fca.html (021)
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