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How many modules?
I have recommended the experimental approach of
formalizing the UMLS semantic network in each of the upper ontologies that are
of interest to members of this WG, and comparing the ontology fragments that
result from this exercise. I don't believe that we will know exactly how
many different logically incompatible theories we will need to
accommodate, nor how high up in the lattice they are, nor how far-reaching their
incompatible logical consequences, until we have made an attempt to build a
non-trivial portion of a merged upper ontology that includes all desired
theories. The UMLS-SN, with 130 classes and 54 semantic relations, seems
to be a good segment of an ontology with which to test these
questions.
I would suggest that the work on formalization of the
UMLS-SN begin by an attempt to come to an agreement on the structure of the
class hierarchy. Formalization of the semantic relations will be the more
important part, but testing the waters by examining the hierarchy should help us
get a feel for how the work can proceed. I plan to put a version of
the UMLS-SN in Protege (incomplete, but it has all the classes and relations) on
our web site by late Monday. I would like to get suggestions first from
Olivier Bodenreider and Lowell Vizenor, but they have been out of contact the
last few days. There has been a lot of discussion and study of
medical ontologies (some of it by Barry Smith), and of the UMLS-SN (e.g. http://ontology.buffalo.edu/medo/UMLS_SN.pdf),
and we will certainly want to take advantage of that prior work, So
anyone who has any documents that they feel we should take into consideration,
please put pointers on the CosmoWG page
[http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?CosmoWG], or send the documents
themselves to me, and I will add them to the reference folder. This Wiki
page is embryonic; feel free to add relevant material or make suggestions for
changes.
In parallel to this effort, we can also commence effort on
formalization of the FEA-RMO and of the DoD Core Taxonomy with respect to one or
more upper ontologies. If there is only enough available effort to do this
with respect to one upper ontology, then we will need to discuss which one to
select.
I am sending a copy of this note to the individualized
mailing list for the COSMO-WG, and the technical discussions will mostly proceed
within that group. The COSMO-WG is open, and anyone who wants to
participate in the COSMO effort can send me a note.
Pat
Patrick Cassidy
MITRE Corporation
260 Industrial
Way
Eatontown, NJ 07724
Mail Stop: MNJE
Phone: 732-578-6340
Cell:
908-565-4053
Fax: 732-578-6012
Email:
pcassidy@xxxxxxxxx
All,
Regarding John Sowa's suggestion of a collection of
modules, I question if it is possible to achieve semantic interoperability
with this approach, since we will certainly have n-squared
modules?
Jim
"Recommendation: Shift attention from the unsolvable
problem
of building, merging, and coordinating global world views
to
the task of developing an open-ended collection of modules
that can
be selected, assembled, and tailored for particular
tasks or collections
of tasks. (015)"
Ralph Hodgson
Executive Partner
TopQuadrant, Inc., www.topquadrant.com
Office: (724) 846-9300 ext. 211,
Direct: (703) 960-1028, Fax: (425) 955-5469, Cell: (781) 789-1664
blog: http://topquadrant.typepad.com/ralph_hodgson/
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