Thank you for sharing your insights, John. (01)
> [JFS] talks ... are generally of high quality and make
> many important points. (02)
[ppy] for this we have the OntologySummit organizing committee and the
respective session chairs to thanks. (03)
I will defer to the others (especially those whose names you have
mentioned) to chime in, but I would like to take the opportunity to
put a plug in for the Mar-21 session[1] which MichaelDenny and I are
putting together, entitled: "Software Environments for Evaluating
Ontologies - II", when, among other wonderful panelists, AdamPease
will be joining us to talk about SUMO and the SigmaKEE (see:
http://sigma-01.cim3.net:8080/sigma/Browse.jsp?kb=SUMO &
http://ontologyportal.org/ ). (04)
[1] developing session details can be found at:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2013_03_21 (05)
Thanks & regards. =ppy
-- (06)
On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 8:07 AM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Peter, et al.,
>
> As I've said before, Thursdays are inconvenient for me to participate
> in telecons. But I usually browse through the slides of talks, which
> are generally of high quality and make many important points.
>
> While I was reading the slides from Thursday's talks, I noticed some
> issues that are central to the way terminologies, taxonomies, and
> ontologies are used now and will continue to be used. For the record,
> following is the URL for Panel Session 08, which has all the URLs:
>
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2013_03_07
>
> I'll start with the slides by Patrick Lambrix, which cover a wide
> range of basic issues:
>
> PL, Slide 11
>> A taxonomy network is a set of taxonomies and sets of mappings
>> between these taxonomies.
>
> PL, Slide 13
>> We focus on taxonomies, named concepts, and is-a relations.
>>
>> We assume that all the existing mappings in the taxonomy networks
>> are correct.
>>
>> The mappings represent equivalence and subsumption.
>
> PL, Slide 14
>> Given a set of taxonomies networked by sets of correct mappings,
>> how to detect and repair the missing and wrong is-a relations
>> in these networked taxonomies?
>
> I agree with these points. But one missing point is the difference
> between the detailed analysis in Slide 3 (about an inconsistency in
> the DICE ontology) and the use of ontology for IR in Slide 5.
>
> The recall/precision issues have been the focus of IR since the 1960s.
> There is some evidence and a lot of hope that ontology can help, but
> the detailed axioms required for reasoning are rarely, if ever, used
> to enhance precision and/or recall in IR.
>
> Question answering is an intermediate case. Some questions can be
> answered by methods similar to IR -- those are questions that Google
> and Bing can often answer with their first or second hits. But other
> questions can require a huge amount of diverse kinds of analysis and
> reasoning (e.g., Watson's answers for Jeopardy!).
>
> For something between those extremes, I spoke with Ron Kaplan, who
> was the chief scientist of the PowerSet/Bing project. They had a
> license to use the full ontology and software of Cyc, but Ron said
> that the only part of Cyc they found useful for their purposes was
> the Cyc hierarchy (taxonomy), not the detailed axioms.
>
> I'd also like to quote a point that Ed Barkmeyer made in a note
> to Ontolog Forum (use Google to find Ed's complete note).
>
> EB
>> Ontologies are made for a purpose. If the purpose is to enable
>> interoperability of independent systems, that is different from the
>> purpose of integrating operational systems and business practices
>> of diverse business units.
>
> I agree. But I would emphasize that those integrating ontologies
> are highly specialized for the purpose of designing compatible
> software for a particular application domain.
>
> Even the engineers who design systems that conform to an integrating
> ontology would also need a broad taxonomy for IR and Q/A. I'm sure
> that they would ask questions about competitive systems and research
> reports that might use the same terminology, but not the same axioms.
>
> I've mentioned Cyc many times, and I have been just as critical about
> aspects of Cyc as I have about the Semantic Web or any other system.
> But I repeat: Cyc is the largest formal ontology on the planet with
> over 28 years of work by highly qualified researchers with PhDs in
> computer science, AI, logic, linguistics, and philosophy.
>
> I certainly don't claim that Cyc has solved all the problems. But the
> single most fundamental and successful Cyc design decision is based on
> Guha's PhD thesis of 1991: Microtheories. He wrote that thesis under
> the supervision of John McCarthy and Ed Feigenbaum at Stanford and with
> collaboration with Doug Lenat and the other Cyc developers.
>
> Guha's basic idea wasn't completely new: an underspecified upper level
> with an open-ended family of detailed microtheories. Guha cited other
> people who said something similar -- including papers by John McCarthy
> and my 1984 book -- but I gave most of the credit to logicians,
> linguists, and philosophers from Aristotle to the present.
>
> As Matthew said, he successfully developed a monolithic ontology at
> Shell as an integrating ontology. As Doug Foxvog replied and I agreed,
> Matthew's ontology could be mapped to a microtheory in Cyc.
>
> Around 2000, Adam Pease was developing SUMO as a monolithic ontology,
> which he discussed on the SUO email list. I recommended that he
> reorganize SUMO along the lines of the Cyc microtheories, but Adam
> resisted. But in the end, he made that reorganization.
>
> Bottom line: If you want to *evaluate* a network of taxonomies and
> ontologies, check whether it has an underspecified upper level and
> a hierarchy of microtheories. If not, give it an F.
>
> John (07)
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