Dear Ed, (01)
I liked the paper, and agree that the methodology affects one's perspective
on what an ontology is, but have a few points. (02)
1) You do not seem to cover the re-engineering of ontologies from legacy
business application systems. Maybe I am mis-reading, but the methodologies
you describe seem to start with corpuses that are linguistic. (03)
2) You classify philosophical as
"Type 1: Abstract feature recombination (the philosophers) . The procedure
of concept creation by additive
feature specification-systematically adding new differentiae-is the
historical method of ontologization;
interesting examples can be found all the way back to Aristotle." (04)
I think this is a little narrow. I would suggest that a philosophical
ontology is one where the top-level distinctions are philosophically
motivated. I think this better describes DOLCE and other efforts. (05)
I suppose I am suggesting the list you have may not be exhaustive. As an
example of a methodology that is based upon a 'philosophical ontology' and
involves the re-engineering of legacy systems you could look at Part Six of
my book -
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0955060303/qid=1147681404/sr=8-2/re
f=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl/202-3709124-5923820 (06)
Hopefully this will provide a useful counter-example to your comment about
philosophical ontlogies:
"The approach is elegant, but unfortunately doesn't work
beyond the very most abstract levels, and is hence not very useful for
practical domain ontologies." (07)
It should also provide a the beginnings of a counter-example to the claim
that having a common upper ontology across a federation of inter-operating
systems is "impossible". (08)
Best regards,
Chris Partridge (09)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontac-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontac-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Eduard Hovy
> Sent: 15 May 2006 01:54
> To: ontac-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [ontac-forum] Re: ontac-forum Digest, Vol 13, Issue 2
>
>
> >Date: Sat, 13 May 2006 23:07:59 -0400
> >From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> >
> >I recently returned from the FLAIRS-06 conference, where Alan Bundy
> >gave a talk that supports many of the points I have been trying to
> >make in various discussions: A single, unified upper ontology is
> >impossible to achieve, and it's not necessary for interoperability.
>
> Amen to both parts of the final sentence!
>
> However, if people were to choose a single methodology (which must
> include, centrally, a clearly-defined set of criteria for deciding on
> which basis some concept should be defined/included, and where it
> should be placed/linked) then I think one can come closer than many
> people seem to believe.
>
> As stated in a paper I wrote last year
> http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/hovy/papers/05ICCS-ontol-
> methods-hovy.pdf,
> I think there are five major methodologies:
> - philosophy
> - linguistics
> - cognitive science / psychology
> - computer science
> - domain reasoning (of various kinds)
> While they provide wildly different answers to even fundamental
> questions, each itself is more internally coherent (if focused
> appropriately), and hence can be useful.
>
> E
>
> --
> Eduard Hovy
> email: hovy@xxxxxxx USC Information Sciences Institute
> tel: 310-448-8731 4676 Admiralty Way
> fax: 310-823-6714 Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
> http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/nlp-at-isi.html
>
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