This discussion has raised many issues that indicate there
are no clear-cut black and white options. It's even more
complex than a linear gray-scale. (01)
MD>> At the same time, I'm reserving judgment (or, remaining
>> agnostic regarding the value, pending evidence), and am
>> harboring a supposition that in the next year or so,
>> technology may be emerging that will obviate UO arguments
>> by subsuming all of these disparate approaches and
>> subjecting them to tests of efficacy. (02)
BA> I am having a very hard time understanding this comment.
> Short of HAL-9000, just what technology might that be that
> will subsume UO or "obviate UO arguments"? (03)
I would like to mention an example of a very large application
that has been able to support interoperability by doing
semi-automated extraction of ontologies from unstructured
documents. The system does have a rather simple upper level,
but the axioms required for interoperability are extracted
as needed -- they are not predefined by the ontology. See
the paragraph at the end of this note. (04)
More info about it can be found on their web site, but the
descriptions are rather salesy and don't get into the technical
detail. The developer, Gerard Ellis, is writing an article
for publication, but it is not yet available. (05)
I wouldn't claim that these techniques will obviate all uses
of an upper ontology, but they do support my point that the
lower levels of the ontology, which are highly task dependent,
are where the detailed axioms belong -- and those axioms can
often be derived with the assistance of users who have no
training in formal logic or even the usual IT. (06)
John Sowa
_______________________________________________________________ (07)
The largest application system that uses conceptual graphs is
Sonetto (IVIS Group 2006), which was designed by Gerard Ellis and
implemented with extended versions of the earlier algorithms by
Levinson and Ellis (1992). A key innovation of Sonetto is its
semi-automated methods for extracting ontologies and business
rules from unstructured documents. The users who assist Sonetto
in the knowledge extraction process are familiar with the subject
matter, but they have no training in programming or knowledge
engineering. The Conceptual Graph Interchange Format (CGIF) is
the knowledge representation for ontologies, rules, and queries.
CGIF is also used to manage the schemas of documents and other
objects in the system and to represent the rules that translate
CGIF to XML and other formats. (08)
References: (09)
IVIS Group (2006) "Sonetto overview," http://www.sonetto.com/sonetto/ (010)
Levinson, Robert A., & Gerard Ellis (1992) "Multilevel
hierarchical retrieval," Knowledge Based Systems 5:3, pp. 233-244. (011)
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