Re: Cross-ontologies reasoning

> > >    [Frank McCabe]
> > >  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.

> >[me]
> >People are kidding themselves.  

> [Jim Hendler]
> Drew,. I agree completely if we use your definition of 
> ontology-merging.  Partial mappings have a greater
> success (particularly allowing heuristic mechanisms), and of course 
> there's no reason we can't have some human in the loop.  Also, none 
> of the literature I know allows instances to be mapped against 
> multiple ontologies, which is a new idea that occurs easily on the 
> Semantic Web, and which opens many opportunities for new research.
>   So I guess I'm kidding myself

I thought Frank meant "fully automatic tools."  But he never said
which people have asserted their existence, so perhaps the
automatic-tool believer is a straw man.

By the way, ontology merging includes the case of partial mapping,
unless we're talking past each other again.  Most of a merged ontology
just consists of imported piles of uncontroversial symbols from all
of the component ontologies involved.

                                             -- Drew

-- 
                                   -- Drew McDermott
                                      Yale Computer Science Department

Received on Monday, 29 December 2003 15:26:37 UTC