Monday, December 12, 2005
The issues related to having a common, widely
used, and available ontology
see: Geoff's short note below
The problem is in defining a boundary that says, this is sufficient to work within. One would never set out to build a house without knowing that one has the list of tools (somewhere in mind) that would be needed to FINISH.
So we are attempting to lay out a "full" set of tools:
http://www.ontologystream.com/beads/nationalDebate/292.htm
at least for a objective and accessable understanding of what SUMO (Suggested Upper Merged Ontology) is.
Then we may move on to the next step - which the BCNGroup is defining as a National Project. This next step needs a K-12 curriculum over something - and just what that something is, is what we are trying to get closure on.
I do not know for example what InferEd is or INET is .... and I just barely seem to have a sense of what RDF Gateway is.
So we need to have a URL to explain each of these terms .... like what one gets in the Wiki encyclopedia. (The Wiki pages developed by individuals is not the same as the Wiki encyclopedia.)
Since terms like this are generated at a blinding speed by the IT companies, we need to have a controlled vocabulary where terms outside this set of vocabulary terms have to be defined using the existing terms.
These tools then need to be understood as being "in" or "out" or something that
1) works
2) is necessary to the evaluation of SUMO
3) is understandable in a finite period of time by someone OTHER than the developer.
This absence of a notion of when I have finished working on gathering tools is a real problem....
It goes on forever, and soon one has forgotten why
one was interested in ontology at all.
<smile> This is no good if
ontology is to be used by average people.
If it is to become a highly esoteric discipline, then the world will
never get into a knowledge age.
We are trying to show a path to "something" where that something is a specific set of tools.. that can be used to achieve a specific architecture... that architecture being a modification of the RoadMap (that I know because I wrote it).
We are looking for closure.
This is NOT what one gets when one starts to use Protege.... as Jennifer Venditti said in a post on this subject... she hopes that the Protege project will go on forever. (I cc her and ask if she will make a comment about this.)
Paul
said:
>
I think that datawarehouse.com will publish the collaborative evaluation
>
of
>
SUMO
>
>
do you have a import of SUMO in the repository?
>
Answer:
There's
an owl version available at:
http://reliant.teknowledge.com/DAML/SUMO.owl
that I use frequently in examples. You can import from there directly
into
InferEd or connect to (and query) via the INET dataservice in RDF
Gateway.
-Geoff