ontolingua lives

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Message-id: <2922677784-6563099@KSL-Mac-69>
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 92  23:56:24 PDT
From: Tom Gruber <Gruber@Sumex-AIM.Stanford.edu>
To: ontolingua@sumex-aim.stanford.edu
Subject: ontolingua lives

Greetings!  I'm pleased to announce that Ontolingua has a new look and
feel, and is going to start getting shaken down by a larger user
group.  This list will serve as a forum for information dissemination,
complaints, bug reports, suggestions, questions, and answers about
ontolingua.  If you don't know what ontolingua is, the next message
will offer an introduction.

First some administrivia.   If you received this message directly
you're on the ontolingua mailing list:
   <ontolingua@sumex-aim.stanford.edu>.
If you got it indirectly, and would like to be on the list, reply to me:
   Tom Gruber <Gruber@Sumex-AIM.Stanford.edu>.   

Please use this list freely (hey, it is free) to ask questions, so
that when they get answered everybody gets the benefit.

Fritz Mueller <mueller@sumex-aim.stanford.edu> has been working hard
to make this "research prototype" more like a solid software product,
and will need your help to know what needs to be done to support your
usage needs. 


Now, for some status information.  As many of you know, KIF 3.0 has
recently came out as a draft proposal.  We have been tracking it and
now have an Ontolingua that can parse the full language and generate
proper KIF when translating into "pure KIF".  There is a working
version of the CLOS code with documentation on 
	sumex-aim.stanford.edu:~ftp/pub/ontolingua/*.

There is also a set of documents about knowledge sharing on
	sumex-aim.stanford.edu:~ftp/pub/k-sharing-papers/*.

These directories will get updated periodically and we'll anounce
changes to this list.  There is an example directory in the ontolingua
directory tree but it is currenly rather sparse.  However, we have
several example ontologies cooking here at the KSL, and will release
those that we can as they get checked out (i.e., that don't belong to
someone who needs to keep them proprietary).  In fact, I'll send out a
nice example in a later message.

Due to a flurry of new activity using ontolingua, the ontolingua code
is actually undergoing a big push, and there will be another release
probably within a few weeks.  The basic organization of the code and
the release mechanism won't change, so you could grab the current code
now and get updates without too much trouble.

However, we need some help from some of you right now.  

If you wrote a translator for the version 1 of ontolingua into your
favorite system, it will need to be updated.  So we either need your
help in updating it on our end or you need our help to fix it from
your end.   If you are maintaining a KB in ontolingua, it will require
some emacs work to get it into the newest format.  We will be glad to
help with that, or do it for you, if you send us the KB.

SO, could you please let me know the following?

  1. what target representation system would you need ontologies
     translated into?
  2. if you wrote a back-end translator for the old ontolingua, can we
     update it for you?
  3. if you wrote an ontology in the old format, can we help you
    transform it?

Now, in the following message, a release description.