John F. Sowa wrote:
> Doug,
>
> I very strongly, in fact, enthusiastically agree with that:
>
> DF> My point was that in many ontologies, the non-leaf nodes are fuzzy.
> > They are merely there to support the leaf nodes, which have crisper
> > meanings.
>
> That is the crux of the arguments about primitives and their value
> for supporting precise interoperability. The upper levels are
> important as guidelines, but I've been arguing that they should be
> very sparsely axiomatized. Any detailed axioms in the upper levels
> are almost certainly going to create inconsistencies with the
> wide range of different applications at the lower levels.
>
> In fact, I believe that the successful applications of RDFS are
> mainly the result of its lack of detail and low expressive power.
> RDFS doesn't create many conflicts because it doesn't say much.
>
> But when you get to the lower levels where you specify the details
> of applications, you need the full expressive power of FOL.
>
> DF> I was considering the FO as modular, above. I was pushing that
> > earlier, and had understood that that was the consensus of the
> > discussion.
>
> I and many other people agree. But there are still questions about
> how big Pat C's collection of primitives would be and how detailed
> their specification would be. I have no quarrel with a collection
> of primitives as guidelines.
>
> My recommendation is to organize the hierarchy of modules and let
> the issues about primitives be resolved by practice and experience
> in the way people use and develop ontologies.
>
As I wrote in an earlier posting, I wonder if there could be file with a
set of metadata and dependencies about the ontology modules that would
allow the user to set up a project with a controlling file that
identifies a set of top level third party modules and have the system
locate the transitive dependencies from repositories and verify
compatibility. (01)
This would promote sharing and adoption of modules while keeping
individual modules small and focused.
If we can figure out what metadata is most helpful in determining
compatibility, dependencies, available formats, versions, etc. that
would allow developers of ontologies to start to work on developing
ontologies. (02)
Ron (03)
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