Re: Cross-ontologies reasoning

At 10:24 -0800 12/17/03, Francis McCabe wrote:
>The 'problem' I was referring to was that of automatically mapping 
>one ontology (written I assume by person or persons A) to another 
>(written by persons B).
>
>People have asserted that there exist automatic tools for doing 
>that. And I was pointing out some corner cases.
>
>Frank

Frank - all the useful tools I know of are human in the loop and 
partial-mapping based -- think of it as a heuristic approach .. FWIW 
and IMHO let me point out that the single greatest innovation of SHOE 
that made it all the way into OWL (through the various intervening 
languages) was basing ontologies on URIs so that linking and mapping 
could happen -- OWL can be used to create mapping ontologies, 
ontologies can evolve by extending each other -- cross ontology 
reasoning is the thing that makes Semantic Web different from all 
other AI ontology work to date - and I've written plenty of papers on 
why it is hard, why it is imprtant, how we can get a handle on doing 
some of it - etc.
  I do think there are some nice doctoral theses to be done (and I'm 
hiring students to do them) in automating more of the mapping (human 
provides partial map, system extends it) within the sorts of mappings 
that OWL allows, but doing this by humans, using ontology tools, is 
presently well within the state of the practice and easy to do ....
  I think I talked about this a bunch at my ISWC talk -- hmm, yes, I 
did -- check out the second major section of [1]
  -JH

[1] http://iswc2003.semanticweb.org/hendler_files/v3_document.htm


-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler 
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
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