I think we are partly talking across purposes. I mostly agree with what Bill
says here.
To some extent, my last message was mainly semantic quibbling, and perhaps not
that useful. (01)
The issue of import is whether we can agree on some variation of: (02)
"A common upper ontology is essential for achieving affordable and
scalable semantic interoperability. Summit participants will explore
alternative approaches to developing or establishing this common upper
ontology." (03)
My original comment was: I cannot endorse this statement for two reasons.
1. I don't know that it is 'essential'.
2. I don't believe is possible to have a single CUO. (04)
1. Bills remarks in this email argue that using ULOs is has very important
benefits, and increasingly such benefits are being backed up with evaluation
studies. I agree. However, the converse does not necessarily hold: "there is no
possible way to achieve these benefits w/o a UO". That is what in means to
say a UO is essential or indispensable. That is much harder to argue/prove and
is what I object to. (05)
2. The wording above "this common upper ontology" strongly suggests that there
is ONE TRUE UO. I object to this, we all agree that one happen. The weakest
(but still useful) notion of a common UO is that at least two applications use
the same UO. Benefits emerge immediately. All is goodness. This group is
really try to increase the degree to which applications can share common UOs.
The theoretical limit, to have ONE TRUE UO, will never be reached. (06)
I suggest the following as something we can all endorse, though you may wish to
endorse a stronger statement, and the wording is not very concise. (07)
================================================================================================
"The use of a common upper ontology is an increasingly important and promising
approach for achieving affordable and scalable semantic interoperability among
semantically heterogeneous applications. Heterogeneity arises because
different applications use different ontologies. Semantic interoperability
requires that these ontologies are mapped or integrated somehow. This process
is expensive and current methods do not scale. Agreeing on a common set of core
upper level concepts dramatically simplifies the process of integrating or
mapping the different domain ontologies used by different applications. (08)
We recognize that there will never be a single Common Upper Ontology used by
all applications. However, neither should there be a different UO for every
group, or division or organization. The goal is to have the maximize what is
in common, and where there are important differences, that they are well
documented so that users know which of the available standards best suit their
purposes. (09)
The (or one) main goal of this summit is to identify viable approaches for
establishing a set of interelated standard upper ontologies.
================================================================================================ (010)
Oh, and by the way, the big elephant in the room is the fact that: (011)
It is the rarest of exceptions these days, that an application even HAS an
ontology, but hey, for the sake of this summit, shall we all pretend that they
do? (012)
Mike (013)
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Andersen [mailto:andersen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2006 3:47 PM
To: Upper Ontology Summit convention
Subject: Re: [uos-convene] Other Approaches Too. (014)
Hey Mike, (015)
See below. (016)
On Feb 28, 2006, at 18:31 , Uschold, Michael F wrote: (017)
> To the extent that 'Indispensable' is a semantic dead-ringer for
> 'essential', this suggestion amounts to changing 'essential' to
> 'increasingly essential'.
>
> Also, indispensable and essential are pretty black and white concepts,
> Either it is or it is not.
>
> It is not clear what 'increasingly essential's means. Nearer to a
> state of being essential, crossing that b/w divide?
>
> The more I think about it, the more I'm ok with the other wording, by
> I forget who.
>
> Something like "essential for affordable and ... semantic
> interoperability"
>
> This is less controversial. (018)
I'm not certain that "less controversial" is something we ought to be shooting
for. The very position that ULO brings something qualitatively different to
building and successfully employing ontologies is what's being assumed in this
forum by its participants. I don't know about the other "public" participants,
but we at Ontology Works have had much success applying our ULO and Barry Smith
documents similar success: (019)
Jonathan Simon, James Matthew Fielding and Barry Smith, "Using Philosophy to
Improve the Coherence and Interoperability of Applications Ontologies: A Field
Report on the Collaboration of IFOMIS and L&C", in Gregor Büchel, Bertin Klein
and Thomas Roth- Berghofer (eds.), Proceedings of the First Workshop on
Philosophy and Informatics. Deutsches Forschungszentrum für künstliche
Intelligenz,
Cologne: 2004, 65-72.
http://ontology.buffalo.edu/medo/FOBKSI.pdf (020)
The point here is that the ROI from using ULO for both domain ontology
construction and for integration is higher than similar attempts undertaken
without ULO. Thus, I don't think Barry's wording is too strong at all. I
would dare say that the onus is on those who advocate some other path to show
that ULO does not have these differential ROI benefits. To do that, they would
have to say how they, without ULO, would have reproduced all the same results -
and at less cost. Such trade studies are sadly lacking. (021)
.bill _________________________________________________________________
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