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Re: [cuo-wg] Additional "upper ontology" to consider

To: "'common upper ontology working group'" <cuo-wg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Schoening, James R C-E LCMC CIO/G6" <James.Schoening@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 23:41:42 -0500
Message-id: <5F6E70D8ED5D274F9D9A721485C0A46213EA543A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Gary,
        Per your suggestion, I added BFO to the list of examples of upper 
ontologies, at http://www.visualknowledge.com/wiki/CDSI    (01)

        Regarding listing John Sowa's proposed Latice of Theories, does anyone 
else have an opinion as to whether this approach could potentially enable CDSI.     (02)


        My question #1:  Does the lattice truly connect all the theories, such 
that independently developed models have some level of interoperability?   If 
so, isn't this an N-squared problem, if the number of theories grows too large?    (03)

Jim Schoening    (04)

-----Original Message-----
From: cuo-wg-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:cuo-wg-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Gary Berg-cross
Sent: Monday, November 13, 2006 5:09 PM
To: cuo-wg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [cuo-wg] Additional "upper ontology" to consider    (05)


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.    (06)

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.    (07)

A key claim from the paper was :    (08)

"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."    (09)


I don't yet have a copy of the PPT, but the abstract is below.    (010)

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    (011)

________________________________________
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 an!
 d 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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