Ontolog invited Speaker Presentation - Dr. Patrick Cassidy - Thu 2004-03-11    (1DY)

Conference Call Details    (1DZ)

Attendees    (1EF)

Agenda Ideas    (1EW)

Agenda & Proceedings    (1EX)

        Pat Cassidy
        MICRA, Inc.
        735 Belvidere Ave.
        Plainfield, NJ 07062-2054
        cassidy@micra.com
        (908) 561-3416
        (908) 668-5252 (if no answer)    (1EZ)

To participate in construction of a reference upper ontology that could serve as the logical defining vocabulary for any domain or specific application -- to promote efficient re-use of research results and application interoperabilty.    (1FA)

My ongoing interest is in the development of natural language understanding systems. I believe that the development of an ontology that can serve to define the concepts in a computational lexicon is a necessary preliminary to the problem of achieving human-level language understanding. Developing such an ontology that is in practice widely used is in consequence a necessary preliminary to the efficient conduct of such research by promoting re-use of results among multiple research groups.    (1FD)

I believe that the development of a widely-used upper ontology is likely to require substantial funding, and I am now exploring with others the best mechanism to obtain funding for such a project.    (1FE)

My participation in the Ontolog discussion group is aimed at two objectives:    (1FF)

(1) to help develop an ontological representation of business entities that can serve as a standard representation to enhance interoperability of electronic commerce applications;    (1FG)

(2) to learn how others view the prepresentation of business entities so as to incorporate those insights into a broader ontology that is capable of being extended into a wide variety of application domains as well as business.    (1FH)

http://vnc2.cim3.net:5800/ (sign in as 'ontolog' to view the presentation. also: see above))    (1FT)

I plan to run a Protege version of SMINK012, the latest version of the ontology that includes the concepts from SUMO and MILO plus those suggested by Adam Pease and those I added to represent business entities. In the limited time available, I will show how I suggest we represent a few of the core components. The basic philosophy of this representation is, that we are representing documents and text fields within documents, and I am suggesting that we represent them as abstract texts, rather than physical documents, so that we can consider only one version of each document or field, and avoid the complications of multiple possible physical representations (paper, computer file, screen visualization). The main point of including these text elements in an ontology is to be able to create links from the text elements to those real-world objects to which the texts refer. The manner of creating such links will be discussed.    (1FU)

Although we will be able to browse the data already imported into Protege (and be able to view it via TightVNC), unfortunately there is some problem reading files from the Protege browser in that environment, and I will not be able to demonstrate importing data from a file into the browser. Peter and I are discussing how to overcome this problem, but it will not be resolved by Thursday. But the files "smink012.zip" and "skif_tab.jar" are available from my site:    (1FV)

ftp://micra.com/ontolog/    (1FW)