Re: scientific publishing task force update

I think this is good. Using upper levels to guide towards good 
choices of properties is very useful.

robert.
At 13:29 13/06/2006, Matthias Samwald wrote:


> > One small, but significant, dislike of the bio-ontology community
> > for SUMO (as used by Solditova and King) is that it isn't really
> > only an upper level. It strays into, for instance, stating a
> > protein is a foodstuff. this, as you might suppose, causes
> > biologists to laugh.
>
>That is very true, and I think that the importance of having huge 
>top-level ontologies like SUMO or maybe Cyc is largely overrated.
>On the other hand, having very small and basic foundational 
>ontologies (e.g. the most basic ontologies of the DOLCE lite 
>ontology, BFO or SKOS) is more important than most developers of 
>ontologies seem to think. It is a great aid to the development of 
>interoperable ontologies to have a common, basic framework of 
>classes (e.g. physical-object, perdurant, quality) and properties 
>(e.g. part-of, participant-in).
>These basic ontologies do not need to be large or complicated to be 
>useful (around 20 classes and properties are sufficient, I guess). 
>Quite to the contrary, making these foundational ontologies too 
>complicated would significantly decrease their usefulness.
>
>
>//Matthias Samwald