RE: scientific publishing task force update

> That is very true, and I think that the importance of having 
> huge top-level ontologies like SUMO or maybe Cyc is largely 
> overrated.

I can't agree anymore. 

Having top level ontology is important as a guideline for the design of a
lower level ontology.  But that does not imply that all lower-level ontology
should be physically tied in to an upper-level ontology. Just as philosophy
is important to our life, but we don't have to quote them everytime we do
something in our daily life.

> 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.

As I always suggested, ontologies should exist in any form and any
granuality.  And ontologies should be partitioned in two levels.  At first,
each of them should exists independent of each other.  Then, on the second
level, we create a sort of application ontology that pieces those ontologies
that are really needed for a particular purpose. This separation process,
what I termed it as ontology normalization, is important to maximize
ontology sharing and reuse as well as the overall stability of the ontology
system.

Xiaoshu

Received on Tuesday, 13 June 2006 13:46:35 UTC