To the DOLCE, SUMO, Upper CYC and BFO upper ontology candidates; I
would suggest that we consider John Sowa's approach to using a Lattice
of concepts as an upper level that can be specialized for focused
needs. (01)
He recently summarized his approach in a presentation called "A
Dynamic Theory of Ontology" at the November 9-11 International
Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2006) held
in Baltimore. (02)
A key claim from the paper was : (03)
"this paper proposes an organization with a dynamically evolving
collection of formal theories, systematic mappings to both formal
lattices of concept types and informal lexicons of natural language
terms, and a methodology that allows independent distributed
development and extension of all the resources, formal and informal." (04)
I don't yet have a copy of the PPT, but the abstract is below. (05)
Gary Berg-Cross, Ph.D.
Service Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Architecture & Semantic Technology
EM&I
Suite 350 455 Spring park Place
Herndon VA 20170
703-742-0585 (06)
________________________________________
Abstract
Natural languages are easy to learn by infants, they can express any
thought that any adult might ever conceive, and they accommodate the
limitations of human breathing rates and short-term memory. The first
property implies a finite vocabulary, the second implies infinite
extensibility, and the third implies a small upper bound on the length
of phrases. Altogether, they imply that most words in a natural
language will have an open-ended number of senses — ambiguity is
inevitable. Peirce and Wittgenstein are two philosophers who
understood that vagueness and ambiguity are not defects in language,
but essential properties that enable it to accommodate anything and
everything that people need to say. In analyzing the ambiguities,
Wittgenstein developed his theory of language games, which allow words
to have different senses in different contexts, applications, or modes
of use. Recent developments in lexical semantics, which are remarkably
compatible with the views of Peirce and Wittgenstein, are based on the
recognition that words have an open-ended number of dynamically
changing and context-dependent microsenses. The resulting flexibility
enables natural languages to adapt to any possible subject from any
perspective for any humanly conceivable purpose. To achieve a
comparable level of flexibility with formal ontologies, this paper
proposes an organization with a dynamically evolving collection of
formal theories, systematic mappings to both formal lattices of
concept types and informal lexicons of natural language terms, and a
methodology that allows independent distributed development and
extension of all the resources, formal and informal.
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