Jim,
(01)
Nice meeting.
(02)
Let me just follow up with a couple of points regarding the issues discussed.
(03)
(1) Your point about not repeating the mistakes that the AI community made is
very valid. The AI community overcommitted, and then when they made strides
forward they got very little credit because expections were higher than the
deliverables could support. When we talk about Ontologies supporting
machine-to-machine interoperability, I think we begin to make our goals sound
too big. More humbly, there are two important tasks that these Ontologies
should support in a netcentric computing environment: (a) heterogeneous data
integration; and (b) automatic service discovery. There may be other
tasks...but these two cover a pretty big chunk of the "interoperability"
problem.
(04)
(2) I mentioned concerns that there's more payoff with the lower level
Ontologies than with the upper level. When we used an "Upper Ontology" for the
STO, we chose GH-5 (C2IEDM) and converted it to OWL. Now that is a
considerably lower level ontology (i.e., more specific to our problem) than you
are addressing with SUMO, PSYC, and DOLCE. I gather from the discussion that
this would be a "Middle Ontology." Later, when we actually went to integrate 2
data sources, we found the real work was still tied to the data. GH-5 helps
some, but you still have to extend it to get an Ontology than can really be
used to access multiple heterogeneous data sources. Similarly, if we wanted to
do automatic service discovery, we would have to do a lot of work to insure the
right terms are defined well enough to support discovery of the kinds of
services we're interested in. I'm not saying that Upper Ontologies are not
important. I am saying that, within DoD we may want to focus on establishing
several quality Middle Ontologies and figure out how to incorporate them into
our systems. That certainly is difficult enough to sit in the research
arena... but is DoD-specific enough to mean that the general research community
will probably not address it without DoD funding. And this bit of focus may
help us to avoid the AI problem discussed above.
(05)
Best regards,
Barbara
(06)
-----Original Message-----
From: Schoening, James R CECOM DCSC4I
[mailto:James.Schoening@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thu 11/18/2004 2:13 PM
To: Broome, Barbara (Civ,ARL/CISD)
Cc:
Subject: RE: Common Upper Ontology Meeting Notes
(07)
Barbara,
(08)
Good points. You should post them to the group at
cuo-wg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(09)
Jim
(010)
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