Re: DAML: About Thing, Nothing and the "universe of discourse"

>
>
>PPS: There are other issues to be resolved with respect to fooThing.  For
>example, would it be disjoint from barThing, where barThing is the top of
>some other ontology?
>

Seems to me that defining a default Thing (and possibly a bottom) 
would make things much easier in general for all of the various 
parties involved -- by rooting all the ontologies at the same root 
node, there would be both mathematical advantages (whole inheritance 
hierarchy would become a rooted graph, and in most cases a rooted 
DAG)  as well as obvious interoperability advantages.   What would be 
the advantage of letting each designer do their own (and why wouldn't 
we want a global one) -- I have often stated that IMHO the best 
"high-level ontology" for the web would be the single node "Thing" 
(or, perhaps that should be http://...//DAML+OIL:DOThing or 
RDFS:RDFSThing)


Dr. James Hendler		jhendler@darpa.mil
Chief Scientist, DARPA/ISO	703-696-2238 (phone)
3701 N. Fairfax Dr.		703-696-2201 (Fax)
Arlington, VA 22203		http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler

Received on Monday, 18 December 2000 10:37:05 UTC