Folks,
I have done some work on the joint communique. I have edited a bit both the background and the introduction to the conclusion, which should be merged in my opinion. I also propose some adjustments to the 5 concluding points, and a one more point on evaluation (to be written). Sometimes I have used capitals to mark my modifications, sometimes I used bold face. I apologize for the uncleaness...
Nicola
P.S.: I am afraid I will not be able to send my slides before Sunday evening.
BACKGROUND:
The science and technology of representing knowledge in a form suitable for use and reasoning in computers has been developing for over thirty years.
DELETED <Practitioners in the field have achieved an increasingly detailed understanding of the fundamental components of meaning and how to represent them in formats suitable for computer processing.> With the success and expansion of the internet, the potential for achieving semantic interoperability across interconnected applications 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 WAY FOR DESCRIBING WHAT COUNTS MOST: SEMANTIC CONTENT.
[Ontologies are now emerging, but interoperability across them is still difficult....]
The complementary technology for effectively representing the semantic content of complex widely used concepts is also available, but agreement on THE NEED TO EXPRESS CONTENT IN TERMS OF standardized setS of conceptual BUILDING BLOCKS has not yet been reached.
The need for such agreement 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 INTENDED meaning by MEANS 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.
DELETED <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.>
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 SYSTEMATICALLY 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 an accurate 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.
As a result, this initiative will significantly enhance the value of the knowledge in each of the communities whose knowledge bases are linked to this reference library of interrelated upper ontologies PREMIS TO THE CONCLUSION [to be merged with the previous stuff in my opinion] The theory and technology of knowledge representation and conceptual modeling have advanced to a stage where meanings of terms can be formally specified in computer systems with great detail and precision. [NG] delete (or postpone) the following: <To demonstrate the power of this technology and provide benchmarks by which objective evaluations of alternative methods of representing knowledge can be tested, it will be helpful to create sophisticated open-source applications available for public evaluation> Each of the existing upper ontologies can provide a basis for a standard of meaning representation for a large set of applications, but the assumptions made are sufficiently different that knowledge in one ontology cannot at present be accurately translated into another. To ease the creation of applications that can take advantage of any of the existing upper ontologies, we now want to develop methods to COMPARE AND relate SUCH ONTOLOGIES to each other. We have agreed to take substantive steps IN THIS DIRECTION, AIMING AT BUILDING A REFERENCE LIBRARY OF CAREFULLY CHOSEN AND EVALUATED UPPER ONTOLOGIES that will be freely available and readily adapted as a basis for any domain ontology. (KNO) Conclusion of the Upper Ontology Summit in Brief (KO1) - Note that the points expressed here succinctly are discussed in more detail in the /ExtendedRemarks page (KSN)
(1) We agree that the technology of modeling and representing knowledge has developed to the point where it makes possible the creation of knowledge-based information systems that significantly enhance the capabilities of existing relational databases and object-oriented systems, to provide information analysis and exploitation capabilities that cannot be realized with those traditional systems alone. (KSV) (2) Each of the existing upper ontologies differs in underlying assumptions and specifics of implementation, but we all agree that use of some formally defined common upper ontology [by an organization or community] is the most cost-effective method for achieving semantic interoperability that can scale from a few applications to several heterogeneous systems. (KTJ) (3) Each of the existing upper ontologies has different strengths, and we believe that the technology will be advanced most rapidly by continuing exploration of such different approaches, while finding the common elements that will help users develop applications that can take advantage of any of the well-structured formal upper ontologies. (KO4) (4) We believe that finding methods to relate different upper ontologies to each other will have near-term practical benefits in enhancing interoperability of information systems, and will also permit more effective investigation of reasoning methods on large knowledge bases. (KO5) (5) As one means of interrelating existing upper ontologies, we plan to explore the possibility of creating a common formal framework that will help establishing accurate links and comparisons, possibly isolating subset ontologies that will be [accurately] translatable into multiple upper ontologies. In addition to making the existing upper ontologies more easily accessible, these common ontologies will provide a simple but powerful tool to allow users to explore creation of interoperable systems with basic reasoning capability on a pilot scale. (6) Something on evaluation. (KNH)
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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