Dave McComb is President of Semantic Arts, and author of "Semantics in Business Systems." He has 30 years of experience applying leading edge technologies to enterprise level applications. (33C7)
- A Minimalist Upper Ontology and Gist: Minimalist Upper Ontology -
Dave McComb (LHF)
- Abstract: A reasoner, or an inference engine, can reason across multiple domains if they have shared or overlapping ontologies. Otherwise two applications or knowledge bases, built to separate ontologies, will not be informed relative to each other. However if they each commit to a third ontology (in addition to those they are based on) it provides a mechanism for knowledge federation. This is the promise of work in upper ontologies: to provide a high level clearing house for concepts. (LHG)
- To date the shear size of the primary candidate upper ontologies, Cyc and SUMO, have intimidated many people who have contemplated using them. In this presentation we introduce “gist,” an upper ontology with 50 core concepts. The presentation covers research in linguistics and anthropology on which some of the concepts are based, and other sources of the primatives. We will describe in outline form, each of the key concepts, and cross reference them to Cyc, SUMO and other high level ontologies. Finally we will complete some worked examples showing how to use gist in real systems. Copies of the ontology and cross references will be made available to all participants. (LHH)
- A Minimalist Upper Ontology: (LHI)
- A title guarenteed to scare off just about everyone: if you're not familiar with work on upper ontologies, the title is just opaque. If you are familiar, you'll likely thing that the combination of "minimalist" with "upper ontology" is an oxymoron. (LHJ)
- So, now that I've gotten rid of all my audience, I can probably say just about anything. And will. (LHK)
- Let's review our position here. For two systems to communicate they must commit to a common ontology. It doesn't matter how elegant or clever your ontology is, if no one else shares it, you don't participate in anything broader than your own ontology. (LHL)
- Given that there are three main positions: (LHM)
- Wait until you want to integrate, and then build a bridge ontology. This works, but is numercially exhaustive if you have a lot of other ontologies to link to. (LHN)
- Integrate on a topic by topic basis. Use a set of special purpose ontologies to link up. This is a reasonable strategy and works for a lot of things (geography for instance) (LHO)
- Commit to an upper ontology early. If you commit to a very broad upper ontology, you are conceptually linked to anyone else who does. (LHP)
- For some that third strategy is very appealling. And there are some options to choose from here, most notably Cyc and SUMO. But, there is also a dark side. Any time you commit to an ontology, you agree to be bound by all the assertions made in that ontology. If nothing else, you need to review them, understand them, and determine whether committing to them will cause problems. (LHQ)
- As a result, the most popular shared ontologies to date have been narrow scope upper ontologies, such as Dublin Core for documents, FoaF for contact lists and interests, and RSS for news feeds. What they all share is a small set of concepts, and relatively few constraints. (LHR)
- I have postulated, built and will present what I call a "minimalist upper ontology." That is, it is very broad in scope, comparable to the large upper ontologies (in this case I am trying to cover commercial information systems, so most of the corporate and government systems, but not games, compilers, embedded or scientific systems). But I have tried to mimic the size of the more popular ontologies: there are about 50 concepts in this ontology. I believe there are immediate benefits for projects adopting it just to remove ambiguity from their definitions. But longer term I think it sets a basis for much broader scale cooperation. (LHS)
- I think I'm on to something here. And it will only be of value if it is shared. So, I will be presenting it at the Semantic Technology Conference, if you can make it Wed afternoon it is called "Gist: Minimalist Upper Ontology." If you are not able to make it to the conference it will be available shortly thereafter, I will have white papers and the ontology itself will be available for free download. (LHT)
- I'm eager to get feedback on this project. (LHU)