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Re: [ontolog-forum] Set of Semantic Primitives (was Guo's blah blah blah

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 22:31:45 -0400
Message-id: <4A233D91.4080308@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Mike and Pat,    (01)

I'm not against the idea of having primitives.  But I am skeptical
about throwing $30 million at an unproved, untested hypothesis.    (02)

MB> Well I've just had a read of Pat's slides as per the link John
 > posted, and I find I agree with a lot of what he is suggesting.    (03)

As I said, Pat's slides are good, and they make a reasonable case
for a study project.  But it is premature to propose a development
project with 100 people when the following requirements are missing:    (04)

  1. A well-defined set of primitives.    (05)

  2. No working prototypes to demonstrate that an ontology based
     on primitives would be useful to support interoperability.    (06)

  3. Lots of evidence that large ontologies have not been been able
     to produce a positive ROI (e.g., the $70+ million spent on Cyc
     and the multibillions of yen spent on the Japanese EDR).    (07)

  4. Practical evidence of successful companies that make independent
     databases interoperate *without* using such an ontology.  For
     example, OntologyWorks started with an upper-level ontology,
     but threw it away because low-level domain-oriented ontologies
     are much more useful.    (08)

For these reasons, a low-budget research project is reasonable,
but not a big-budget development project with 100 people and
no clear specification of what they would do.    (09)

John    (010)




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