Just one point to reassure: (01)
UOS-announcement goal 2:
>and to increase public
> awareness of the maturity and capabilities of ontology technology for (02)
> automating information analysis and exploitation. (03)
Mike Uschold: This troubles me. The scope is fantastically broad, and
really has
little to do with upper ontologies, per se. Isn't this the goal of the
organizers of the Semantic Technology Conference series in San Jose? Do
we really want to do this in this group? What is our real goal?
------- (04)
No need to be troubled. Disseminating the news that ontology
technology has reached a stage where seriously useful applications can
be developed is unlikely to be accomplished by a single conference on
the West Coast, and there will be little duplication of the even more
"fantastically broad" goals of that conference. There are certainly
some highly related presentations at that conference, including those
by Adam Pease and Doug Lenat. Interestingly, the summary of one of the
presentations there
(http://www.semtech2006.com/program/sessions/P5.html) echoes one of the
issues the UOS panel might want to deal with - getting people to
overcome their intimidation by the complexity of the large upper
ontologies. And Doug Lenat's topic
(http://www.semtech2006.com/program/sessions/I2.html) also directly
addresses one of the potential approaches to easing adoption of upper
ontology technology. But the upper ontology is only a very small part
of that conference. The focus of the UOS meeting is indeed, as its
name suggests, the upper ontologies (very modest as compared with
"semantic technologies"). (05)
The reason this conference was organized is to gain some anticipated
benefits from finding relations among the existing upper ontologies.
The "real goal" will be whatever the 8 upper ontology custodians decide
it should be, with perhaps some suggestions from the organizers, key
participants (e.g. MU - any suggestions?), potential users, and
potential funders. (06)
The need for some public education on the issue of the utility of upper
ontologies has been suggested (to me) by numerous comments from people
who should know better, to the effect that upper ontologies, if not
utterly irrelevant to current applications, are still an embryonic
technology not likely to warrant attention from people with immediate
problems to solve. That attitude is badly misinformed, and one
beneficial effect one can hope for from the Upper Ontology Summit is to
begin to correct the mistaken impressions that many in the IT field
have absorbed about the utility of upper ontologies and the current
state of the technology. How that current state can be characterized
will be one of the topics that the UOS panel will be uniquely qualified
to discuss and describe to the wider world. (07)
If any among us are going to the Semantic Technology conference in
early March, it might be educational for all of us if you were to carry
out some informal polling to learn how the attendees of that conference
view the utility of upper ontologies. Keep good notes, especially on
specific comments, positive or negative. That might help in deciding
what kind of public information releases would be needed to address any
mistaken impressions about UOs that are circulating among people with
an interest in information semantics. (08)
Pat (09)
Patrick Cassidy
MITRE Corporation
260 Industrial Way
Eatontown, NJ 07724
Mail Stop: MNJE
Phone: 732-578-6340
Cell: 908-565-4053
Fax: 732-578-6012
Email: pcassidy@xxxxxxxxx (010)
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