paper on ontology sharing

RDF/S Folk,

I have a new short paper on "ontology sharing" that may be of interest to
the RDF/S community:
    "The Information Flow Foundation for Conceptual Knowledge Organization."
To appear in
    the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference of ISKO (the
International Society for
    Knowledge Organization).
[http://www.ontologos.org/Papers/ISKO6/ISKO6.PDF]
This paper touches on some of the recent discussion topics on this list:
constraints such as
disjointness or covering, identification versus description, etc. In the
paper I have tried to
communicate on three different levels: intuitive, mathematical (standard),
and mathematical
(category-theoretic). As mentioned in the paper, there is a focus on the
knowledge bases of
communities. To enable ontology sharing in a distributed environment,
several principles are
used:
  Principle 1. A community owns its collection of instances:
    (a) it controls updates to the collection;
    (b) it can enforce soundness;
    (c) it controls access rights to the collection.
  Principle 2. Instances are linked through their types
    - in order to be able to compare instances of two specific ontologies,
we must use
      the free logic of the generic ontology containing all of its formal
instances.
I stress that the approach for ontology sharing described in the paper is a
"principled approach"
in that it has a well-defined foundation, the distributed (hard) logic of
Information Flow developed by
Jon Barwise and Jerry Seligman. These principles and this approach can
possibly be usefully
compared and contrasted with the architecture of the Semantic Web.

As always, your comments and suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

Robert

Received on Wednesday, 8 March 2000 17:25:36 UTC