RE: Web Services Architecture Document

Just sort of intuitively I would think that in order to be an "upper
level ontology" as you describe it would be nice if the thing were
worked more extensively as an ontology than the WSA has been.  That is,
I would imagine that you would want to have a pretty fair confidence
that it could be used in unpredictable situations in that way, and I
would think you would want to get such confidence by working with the
ontology a fair amount and feeding back that experience into the
definition of the WSA itself, and iterating as appropriate.  We did not
do that, other than noting from the ontology certain logical
inconsistencies or missing stuff.

-----Original Message-----
From: Bijan Parsia [mailto:bparsia@isr.umd.edu] 
Sent: Sunday, February 01, 2004 11:22 AM
To: Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler)
Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: 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.

Received on Sunday, 1 February 2004 13:36:57 UTC