Re: Web Services Architecture Document

On Jan 31, 2004, at 9:11 PM, Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler) wrote:

> OK, I've heard this term enough and I've just gotta ask ... What is an
> "upper level ontology"?  It appears from context to have some sort of
> pretty specific meaning. Everybody contributing to this discussion 
> seems
> to know it but I sure don't.

Crudely, it's the top bits of a class (and relation) tree. Bit less 
crudely, it's the top bits of a class (and relation) tree that aren't 
particular domain specific, i.e., are fairly abstract.

See:	 http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/toplevel.htm for an example with 
discussion.

So, roughly, you might expect all further ontologies (for WSDL, 
ws-chore) etc. to be defined "in terms of" the upper ontology (WS-A), 
at least, in the sense, that you'd be subclassing off concepts in the 
WS-A.

I would count WS-A as not a general upper ontology as it's pretty 
specific to, say, distributed computational systems.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.