Folks, I have tried some editing of the joint communique's background section. Comments below (I know I may have used the wiki, but I am not so used to these things). I proceed reading the conclusion. I look forward to talking with you at the telecon, in twenty minutes.
Nicola
The science and technology of representing knowledge in a form suitable for use and reasoning in computers has been developing for over thirty years. Practitioners in the field have achieved an increasingly detailed understanding of the fundamental components of *meaning*... Maybe we should say something on the detailed understanding of the "ways of modeling reality"... and how to represent them in formats suitable for computer processing. With the success and expansion of the internet, the potential for creation of a Semantic Web...
Maybe: "the potential for achieving semantic interoperability across interconnected applications" (the Semantic Web shouldn't be stress to much here; semantic interoperability goes much beyond it) has become widely recognized, and the number of teams and individuals creating knowledge classifications of varying degrees of logical formality has dramatically increased. As this technology develops further it will enable deployment of computer applications with increasing ability to make reliable knowledge-based decisions that currently require human effort. Programs with such enhanced capacity will increase the speed and efficiency of automated information analysis and exploitation.
Much recent emphasis has been focused on creating common syntactical formalisms for representing knowledge, but syntactical formalisms alone do not provide an effective standard of meaning. Maybe: "standard for describing content" The complementary technology for effectively representing the semantic content of complex widely used concepts is also available, but agreement on a standardized set of conceptual elements has not yet been reached.
Maybe: "conceptual elements" -> "conceptual primitives for representing such content"The need for such agreement
Maybe: "the need for such basic conceptual primitives"
is increasing rapidly as many isolated projects of varying complexity have been initiated to capture knowledge in computer-interpretable formalisms. Without a common resource for specifying meaning in a uniform fashion
...for specifying intended meaning by means of a variety of well-understood conceptual primitives clearly related and contrasted one each other
, the great potential for sharing knowledge usable for computer reasoning will not be realized. A new initiative is needed to find agreement on a set of basic concepts that can be easily understood and exploited by diverse communities of users to permit their systems to accurately exchange detailed meanings for the concepts they need to communicate with each other.
I would move this paragraph later (or perhaps delete it - looks a bit redundant) The basis for detailed representation of meaning is These conceptual primitives are now available in several upper ontologies together with associated mid-level and domain ontologies, reflecting the results of decades of research and development in knowledge representation
... and conceptual modeling
. Each of these ontologies has an existing community of users. Finding a means to
sistematically
relate these ontologies to each other and to make them easily usable by other developers of domain ontologies can provide users with access
to the content description primitives that fit best their needs and culture, guaranteeing at the same time anaccurate interchange of conceptual information among multiple communities
whenever possible, and - perhaps even more important - the explicit recognition of the reasons of disagreement in case of incompatible assumptions., significantly enhancing
As a result, this initiative will significantly enhance
the value of the knowledge in each of the communities whose knowledge bases are linked to the common standard.
...are linked to this common set of interrelated upper ontologies
----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nicola Guarino Co-Editor in Chief, Applied Ontology (IOS Press) Head, Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA), ISTC-CNR Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies National Research Council Via Solteri, 38 I-38100 Trento
phone: +39 0461 828486 secretary: +39 0461 436641 fax: +39 0461 435344 email: guarino@xxxxxxxxxx web site: http://www.loa-cnr.it
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