new ontolingua documentation and software
Tom Gruber <gruber@HPP.Stanford.EDU>
Message-id: <199405130043.RAA05579@HPP.Stanford.EDU>
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Date: Thu, 12 May 1994 17:45:43 -0800
To: ontolingua@HPP.Stanford.EDU
From: Tom Gruber <gruber@HPP.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: new ontolingua documentation and software
To those interested in Ontolingua:
Hello. It has been too long since we've made any announcements or responded
to questions about Ontolingua. My apologies.
I'm happy to announce that we're about to release the latest and greatest
ontolingua version. Notable among the improvements is the documentation. The
reference manual, installation guide, status report, and even the email list
are all now on-line, and cross linked on the World Wide Web. Here is the
address of the "home page" or entry point to the web of documentation:
http://ksl-web.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/ontolingua/ontolingua.html
The ftp address of ontolingua software and documentation is
host: ksl.stanford.edu directory: /pub/knowledge-sharing/ontolingua/
Since this message will be added to an archive of messages that is also on the
web, and processed so that you can access documentation, examples of
ontologies, and relevant messages from with only a click on a hypertext link.
For example, clicking on the WWW address above leads to the document it points
to -- simple enough! That document will tell you where the email archives
live.
What's New
One of the exciting new things that we've been doing is generating "human
readable" hypertext reports from "machine readable" ontologies using
ontolingua. The technology for doing this has been through two rewrites now,
and it is included in the latest release. If you've seen these hypertextified
ontologies before, you will notice that they are now decomposed and can be
viewed 10-50 times faster on slow machines or machines with poor internet
connectivity. The ontology library is available as part of the ARPA knowledge
sharing library at
http://ksl-web.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/ontologies/
You can generate such a library at your site using the latest Ontolingua (but
I'd like you to share them with the community and will be glad to post
Ontolingua-encoded ontologies to the KSE library).
There are other new capabilities in Ontolingua you may wish to investigate,
such as a built-in frame system, an Lisp API for frame systems (to be
announced to this list soon) and other goodies. Read ontolingua-status
(http://ksl-web.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/ontolingua/doc/ontolingua-status.html)
for the details.
Okay, here's the information you really need. The latest release is
4.0.alpha. It is "alpha" because we know there are bugs in the Loom
translator, and we suspect there may some in Lisps other than those we test at
the KSL (Lucid, Franz, MCL). You get the alpha version if you agree to
complain to this list with bug reports. Actually, you can have it anyway, but
the bugs stay as they are unless you complain. We are working with the Loom
developers to build a translation bridge from KIF to the latest Loom, and we
have other translators in the works (CLIPS 6.0, Musen's MODEL).
Stay tuned to this list for announcements.
Tom Gruber <gruber@ksl.stanford.edu>
P.S. All these documents with the http: prefix are also accessible in raw text form
using ftp from ksl.stanford.edu: /pub/knowledge-sharing/ontolingua/
If you have internet access, however, it is time you got a WWW broswer.
You can get a nice one by ftp from ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu under the Mosaic directory.