----- Original Message -----
From: "Patrick Cassidy" <pat@xxxxxxxxx> (01)
> Responses to points from several participants:
>
> RHM: > We will advance the state of the art more quickly by building
> useful
> single ontologies for particular applications, instead of searching for an
> upper ontology which is suitable for all applications.
>
> [PC] That would definitely be helpful. But since there are no such
> practical applications yet accessible to the general public, my suggestion
> for a Foundation Ontology project includes the development of some
> practical
> applications, among which I would recommend a basic natural Language
> capability (5-6 year old English speaker) and integration of several
> databases as examples. These efforts would in my expectation be
> synergistic
> and would benefit from the integrating effect of the common FO. If we
> want
> real practical applications **available to public inspection**, the public
> is going to have to pay for it.
#### There are commercial companies which are selling NL interfaces.
#### Dick McCullough
>
> [John Sowa] . If Cyc has not already solved problem X with their
> ontology,
> what makes you think that your proposed ontology will solve X?
>
> [PC] Because the issue isn't the quality of the ontology. Cyc hasn't
> focused enough effort on developing a **publicly available** application
> that will demonstrate the utility of the ontology. Because we already
> have
> the benefit of a lot of Cyc's effort, which does not have to be
> reproduced,
> we can focus on the missing parts. In particular we need a good Natural
> Language interface that can hold a coherent basic conversation. I do not
> know exactly how much effort Cyc has spent on such an application, but in
> spite of the asserted goal of 'commonsense reasoning', the evidence I have
> seen is that most of their effort was diverted into very domain-specific
> work. Building an open community of users that can all contribute to the
> common project is a very, very different development method than that used
> by Cyc (any improvement directly benefits the contributor, who can use the
> improved system freely). The FO project will create a **scientific
> community** of developers that have a common paradigm of meaning and of
> natural language processing, who can evolve the integrated system
> incrementally and that will have a much better chance of making progress
> than any local group. The development method is very different from any
> available to a small commercial concern. (02)
#### CycFoundation is doing exactly what you said CyCorp does not do.
#### It is building an open community of users/developers.
#### I think CycFoundation will be successful, and will have more & more
#### influence on what CyCorp does do.
#### Dick McCullough
>
> Pat
> (03)
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