On Fri, February 15, 2013 14:54, Barkmeyer, Edward J wrote:
> John Sowa wrote:
> ...
>> I'll start with Slide 19 in Barry Smith's talk:
>> > Candidate Upper Level Ontologies
>> > - Domain Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) -
>> > Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) - Upper Cyc Ontology -
>> > Basic Formal Ontology - all reflections of recognized need for semantic
>> > standardization via upper level ontology (01)
>> That may be true of what the DOLCE, SUMO, and BFO developers say.
>> But it is definitely *not* true of Cyc. Doug Lenat has explicitly said
>> that the
>> upper level is the *least* important. He said that
>> *all* the detailed reasoning is based on axioms and definitions at the
>> mid level and lower levels. (02)
> It seems to me that there is a powerful empirical test for the validity of
> this assertion. Remove the upper level axioms from the KB and run the
> same queries. (03)
If the definitions of language elements (type, relation, function, subtype,
instance of, if-then[-else], thereExists, forAll, not) is part of the
"upper level
ontology",then this would not be true since all of the axioms and definitions
at the mid and low levels are based on such elements. Cyc actually defines
such terms in its upper level ontology, but it is clear that that is not what
Doug Lenat meant. (04)
> <snip> (05)
> ... An ontology is a model. " All models are wrong; some are
> useful." An ontology is made for a purpose. It includes what is useful
> to the purpose.
> That said, an ontology may borrow from, or wholly incorporate, an ontology
> made for another purpose, as long as it is not inconsistent with the needs
> for the current purpose. (06)
> As some wag said of software modules, there is no such thing as design for
> unknown reuse. Reuse arises by serendipity and when it is mandated. (07)
That may be part of the problem with Cyc. Cyc's higher levels *were*
designed for reuse. Project-specific rules and terms were supposed to
be defined at far lower levels. Unfortunately, in OpenCyc, many of the
low-level terms have been moved up to a "UniversalVocabulary" microtheory
so that the distinction has been lost. (08)
-- doug foxvog (09)
> ...
> -Ed
>
>>
>> John (010)
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