WEBONT "HOMEWORK"

What I would like:

1. An ontology language which was expressive and 'natural' enough to 
encode most currently extant ontologies. That is considerably more 
expressive than a description logic, but it can have a description 
logic as a natural sublanguage (the part of the larger language that 
deals with type-class reasoning). The natural choice would be some 
variant of either an extended first-order logic such as ISO-KIF, or 
possibly a type theory-based logic like LF. Part of the development 
work would be to include a notion of proof-carrying authorization in 
the proof theory of the ontology language.

2. The homework would be to integrate this expressive language with 
the kind of human-oriented interface being developed in the context 
of the DARPA RKF project, in which a 'graphic' interface allows 
subject-mater experts who know zilch about KR or logic to fairly 
easily, with some training and practice, create large, complex 
ontologies in man-month timeframes. Hopefully, this could be designed 
in such a way that later work could build on earlier work, in the 
sense that the concepts developed in earlier ontologies can be 
utilised in later ones.

3. In a parallel effort, a fairly small team of ontological engineers 
can systematically collect existing useful ontologies of broad 
utility - of which there are now several hundred, covering topics 
such as: time-intervals and calendars, part/whole mereological 
theories, spatial reasoning, order-sensitive reasoning, theories of 
networks and reticulations, process and action descriptions, 
industrial processes, etc. etc. . Some of these are more 'abstract' 
than others; the sources range from philosophical analyses to 
industrial standards organizations; but they can all be put into a 
common framework, and indeed are being so put into a subset of 
ISO-KIF by a small team of people at Teknowledge, right now.

All of this is actual work in progress, and could be adopted and put 
into the service of the WebOnt effort immediately. It seems silly to 
ignore it.

Pat Hayes
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Received on Thursday, 29 November 2001 11:38:50 UTC