RE: [EXT] Re: Upper ontologies

I think the issue of upper ontologies could be relatively straightforward. Some esteemed organization (W3C?) should initiate an upper ontology working group that would become a major effort. By major effort I don’t mean going to the moon or Mars, but something very major indeed. It would probably require funding from multiple governments to reach the necessary scale of effort. It would select an eminent group of experts as the core working group members who would have the final say in defining the “standard upper ontology”. Inputs would be requested from a very wide source of developers to be considered by the working group. Th e goal of the working group would be to identify, as best as possible, what is true and meaningful in terms of relationships and what is not. A good starting point would be measurements and geographic classes and properties. There is a lot of good work already in these areas that could be leveraged. The next job would be to identify a constrained list of the top-level real world things that most domain specific ontology would need to reference. The ultimate release of the “Standard Upper Ontology” would serve the widest categories of ontology developers and they would all be strongly encouraged to use the standard in order to achieve the maximum interoperability. Those ontology developers who simply cannot live with the standard could go there own way, but realizing they have given up the opportunity to seamlessly interoperate with the majority of the Semantic Web community.

 

John Flynn

Semanticsimulations.com

 

From: Gabriel Lopes <gabriellopes9102@gmail.com> 
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2021 11:54 AM
To: semantic-web@w3.org
Cc: Mikael Pesonen <mikael.pesonen@lingsoft.fi>
Subject: Re: [EXT] Re: Upper ontologies

 

  Very nice discussion! 

Definitely, it was not a stupid question, Mikael ;-)!! 

Personally, I do think this persecution of a global standardization - a standardization of standardizations, one that fits all - is a consequence of our apparent inability to focus on different scenarios all at once continuously, or multi-focusing multi-dimensional dynamic systems in a continuous and progressive way. Otherwise what we call 'One' would be known as 'Everything'.

 

I would be really amazed if one day the Semantic Web community arrives to choose one single UO, instead of being chained to several options. As it was already stated over this thread, there are several perspectives and interpretations, and none of the existing ontologies would be representative enough to cover all of them... As every standardization process is done by a group that represents sets of interests, interpretations,..., point-of-views.

Maybe the answer for ideal interoperability would not lie over a magnific idea of some group, who has built an amazing UO that is able to be mapped onto everything that exists (and non-exists), but, instead, some ontology evolved entity that is able to learn from different concepts, even when their syntactic representations diverge from each other.

 

Philosophical Speculations...


But, how to abstract from the syntactic representation we're entangled in order to define concepts, statements,..., according to the data-models we have for representing ontologies? 'Procedure' must be a viable label for referencing a Technique developed to measure a given Property or Attribute of a given Object, Feature of Interest, and so on... Some would say that Method is also a viable label for doing so.


But, with such different labels, probably synonyms, what are we referencing? The real scenarios where a given activity may take place or the knowledge behind them, the 'receipt'? Is this receipt syntactic-free as a 'real'-world abstract object? In other words, is an axiom the really 'indivisible unit' of knowledge?

I still have no idea... But Semantic Web seems to be a promising Philosophical bridge that Computer Science needed to continue its evolution. IMO

 

Em qua., 13 de jan. de 2021 às 15:24, Dr. Leo J Obrst <lobrst@mitre.org <mailto:lobrst@mitre.org> > escreveu:

In fact, that was the topic of the first Ontology Summit we held in 2006 (Ontolog Forum, NIST, etc.):
https://ontologforum.org/index.php/UpperOntologySummit

Here's the Joint Communique:
https://philpapers.org/archive/OBRTU.pdf.

Obrst, Leo; Patrick Cassidy; Steve Ray; Barry Smith; Dagobert Soergel; Matthew West; Peter Yim. 2006. The 2006 Upper Ontology Summit Joint Communiqué. Journal of Applied Ontology. Volume 1: 2, pp. 203 - 211, 2006. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Mikael Pesonen <mikael.pesonen@lingsoft.fi <mailto:mikael.pesonen@lingsoft.fi> > 
Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2021 8:00 AM
To: semantic-web@w3.org <mailto:semantic-web@w3.org> 
Subject: [EXT] Re: Upper ontologies


Lots of interesting points mentionedand probably the main case against one UO being different point of views.

As a thought experiment, wonder if that would be any problem to combine those existing 17 UOs into one. So how big an issue is that really in practical needs and applications?






 

-- 

PhD. student at École des Mines in Saint-Étienne

 

Interoperability as a work-mission and a passion.... How magnificent it is the possibility to communicate? Words, symbols, consensus, grammars....Notes. 

How interoperable are we with the world as it is offered to our senses?