| To: | "Upper Ontology Summit convention" <uos-convene@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> |
|---|---|
| From: | "Cassidy, Patrick J." <pcassidy@xxxxxxxxx> |
| Date: | Fri, 10 Mar 2006 12:27:59 -0500 |
| Message-id: | <6ACD6742E291AF459206FFF2897764BE9E5562@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> |
|
Bill, Adam, Doug, Matthew, other UOS
panelists:
A review of the purpose of the meeting
generally, and of the Wednesday morning session in particular is appended
below.
Peter Yim has suggested that we have another
telecon to discuss the agenda. Can any of the UOS-conveners find an hour or two
to talk to today, starting either 2 PM or 3 M New York time?
The Wednesday morning meeting
schedule suggested by Adam seems predicated on the schedule suggested for
Tuesday, and the suggested Tuesday session does not take into consideration the
scheduled intermission from 10:30 to 12 for people to attend the plenary session
of the Interoperability Week. Steve will have to attend that session -
perhaps the rest of us can chose to continue the UO discussions, but that was
not part of the original schedule. Steve Ray will have to decide whether
there will be any problem allowing the UOS Tuesday meeting to continue in
parallel with the plenary session.
There are eight invited panelists and
any decisions by the panelists needs to be taken as a group. At this
point, it does not appear that a majority of the eight panelists will agree that
the "three formal upper ontologies" should have some priority in Tuesday's
meeting. If five of the panelists agree to Adam's Tuesday agenda, I
would support those changes.
But the main purpose of the Tuesday
meeting is to determine whether there is any merit in trying to find relations
among the existing upper ontologies, and to the extent that Adam's
suggestion prejudges that issue, it is not in keeping with the intended purpose
of that part of the conference. Any of the
panelists can present their case that OpenCyc, SUMO, and DOLCE are the main
upper ontologies that contend for adoption by others - and some others may
agree. The organizing committee believed that each of the panelists, and
some of the key participants, would have important contributions to make in any
project undertaken to interrelate existing upper ontologies. Doug Lenat
mentioned that he has "decades
of actual experiences doing this that we can share with you",
and I don't disagree. But insofar as the main focus
of Tuesday is to discover whether there is any merit in interrelating the
existing upper ontologies, it does not seem to me likely that any presentations
on Tuesday that are not specifically directed at that question will advance a
resolution of the question. For Wednesday, the panelists may decide that
they prefer to give a general presentation of each system
On Tuesday afternoon, I would think that the
work on the public statement must come after the discussion of the merits of
interrelating existing upper ontologies, as the conclusion of that discussion
should be reflected in the statement.
Adam's proposed Wednesday morning session is
not related to the original purpose of that session. The organizers felt
that there should be one session focused on promoting a dialogue between the
upper ontology custodians and potential users, with potential funders listening
in to determine whether there is enough merit in the upper ontology efforts to
warrant additional investment. In deciding what to do on Wednesday, please
read the summary below.
Pat
===========================================
Purpose of the meeting:
The set of meetings was organized to
serve several purposes, centering around the question of whether the custodians
of existing upper-level ontologies, after proper discussion, decided
whether they would want to make an effort to find relations among their upper
ontologies in some manner, so as to permit some form of cross-usability of the
knowledge expressed in the different paradigms of the different upper
ontologies. The public session on Wednesday afternoon is an opportunity
for the panelists to tell the world the result of these discussions and how they
believe the upper ontologies will make important contributions to information
technology. The meetings are predominantly by and for the eight invited
panelists, and the other key participants were invited because it was expected
that they would be able to help make suggestions to the panelists. The
emphasis is on the discussions among the panelists looking toward the future of
upper ontology technology. This meeting was arranged partly as
a sequel to the series of Ontology Forum telecons at which (most of) the
panelists had an opportunity to present their approaches to ontology development
to the public. Those meeting proceedings are still available online.
The focus of this meeting was to enable discussions among the custodians of
public upper-level ontologies. This was not viewed as just a forum for
presenting existing work, though that could be part of it.
The second paragraph from the invitation note
sent by Steve Ray on February 15th to panelists and key participants
was:
The two broad goals proposed by the organizing committee are: to
find
methods to interrelate existing upper ontologies so as to permit users
of each
to reuse knowledge expressed in the others; and to increase
public
awareness of the maturity and capabilities of ontology technology
for
automating information analysis and
exploitation.
Correspondingly, the discussions leading up to the meeting and the
meeting
itself will deal with both technical and public-relations issues. The
goal of
improving the public perception of the current state and potential
for
ontology technologies will be as significant as the technical questions
to be
explored.
The result could be to inform the public how, going forward, the upper ontologies will relate to each other (if at all) and how they could be used to advantage in applications. The public-relations aspect would provide an opportunity for the upper ontology custodians to increase use of their systems by explaining to a broad audience why they are needed. It might also help to make a case for increased funding of research in upper ontologies.
As Brand said, the public meeting Wednesday
afternoon and semi-public meeting Wednesday morning are by and for the
panelists, with the rest of us as a supporting cast.
The purposes that the Wednesday morning
meeting was intended to serve are:
(1) to let potential users of the upper
ontologies (other than the custodians themselves) understand how they can
benefit from the upper ontologies
(2) if by the end of the Tuesday meetings the
panelists have concluded that a project to interrelate (at least some
of) the upper ontologies (e.g. by finding a common subset ontology)
is desirable, they will have an opportunity to outline such a project and its
benefits to agencies that might fund such research. A representative of
NSF will be at that meeting.
If the panelists decide that no funded
efforts at relating the upper ontologies are warranted, then that session might
be devoted exclusively to presentations by the panelists if they so
decide. This question of whether the panelists see any benefit in
interrelating their ontologies could not be answered by the organizers, and the
Tuesday session is intended to provide the answer. The general intent of
the meeting was decided over a month ago, but the details have been slow to
emerge, as the views of the panelists and key participants are becoming
known.
To answer one of Bill's questions about the
Wednesday morning meeting: no reporters were specifically informed of that
meeting and none are expected to attend. If one does show up, I don't know
if we have a way to eject him/her - Steve will have to answer that, if that is
of concern to the panelists.
To get
additional perspective on the proposed organization Wednesday morning's session
(which can be changed as the panelists see fit), you may recall that Brand
Niemann, the chair of the federal SICoP, and chair of the Wednesday Morning
session, has been working for years to find the means to achieve semantic
interoperability ***throughout the federal government***. As part of this
effort, it is necessary for him to make potential users within the federal
government aware both of existing technology and of emerging technologies that
can help to achieve that purpose. To the extent that vendors of
semantic technologies may adopt an upper ontology as part of their own systems,
it would be useful to get their views on how they might use a UO. If,
however, the panelists would prefer to use all of that Wednesday Morning time to
present their systems, with little or no time for feedback from potential users,
they may decide collectively to do so. However, potential funders may be
more interested in learning whether there is any potential practical
uses of those ontologies rather than learning about he details of each
ontology individually. It is a call for the panelists to
make.
=== Patrick Cassidy
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