Re: Core Ontology on Events -- Re: looking for an event ontology/vocabulary

Hello!

> It is quite interesting to see this very long thread on events. In the past time
> we have studied many event models (see, e.g., the list Raphael Troncy sent around).
> When studying them, I was very surprised that for many of them no foundational
> literature was studied (philosophy, linguistics, cognitive sciences, etc.).
> Rather, the models seem to be developed add hoc and remain in fact quite simple
> for the always argued reason of "being generic".

Being generic isn't incompatible with being well-founded. I am curious
about what ontologies you looked at and as to why you thought they
weren't well founded. Reading an ontology spec won't tell you what the
authors of the ontology read (and reading your ontology doesn't tell
it either - apart from the DOLCE links). And most of the other
ontologies you cite in your paper are well-founded IMHO. Don't get me
wrong - I think it is important there are different ontologies out
there for similar concepts, representing different views of the world,
and I am therefore really excited about Event-Model-F.

>
> Libby Miller says, "events are difficult and complex things to model". And we
> would like to stress that fact. Indeed, getting a fully comprehensive understanding
> of what events are is very difficult and challenging. As such, a simple model
> will hardly work. In particular, when interoperability between different systems
> is needed.
>
> Thus, I am happy to announce that at this year's Knowledge Capturing conference
> we will present the Event-Model-F that aims filling the gap of a comprehensive and
> at the same time semantically precise event model [1]. The event model is available
> in OWL and axiomatized using DL (see older TR [2]). What I did for this event model
> is reading literature of foundational sciences and discussing the topic with
> philosophers. The Event-Model-F provides comprehensive support to represent
> * time and space,
> * objects and persons participating in events, and
> * mereological, causal, and correlative relationships between events.
> In addition, the Event-Model-F provides a flexible means for
> * event composition,
> * modeling event causality and event correlation, and
> * representing different interpretations of the same event.
>

That last point is very interesting - we are running into similar
problems when trying to represent news at the BBC. However, I am not
sure whether it should belong to an event ontology - if multiple
interpretations were modeled in a separate ontology, you could
represent multiple interpretations of a single writing, of a single
document, etc.

> As sometimes not all of this functionality is needed, the event model is organized
> in patterns. Thus, it is easier to understand to use (just take what you need
> and the leave the rest out).
>
> The event model has its own webpage, where also comprehensive examples are
> available, e.g., from the emergency response domain:
> http://isweb.uni-koblenz.de/eventmodel/
>

Just two small comments: would it be possible to not make the examples
available in zip files? Also, it looks like the content-type of the
ontology is not right. And it would be great if you could put an HTML
spec online - conneg'ed from the main ontology URI.

Cheers,
y

Received on Friday, 31 July 2009 09:21:33 UTC