some questions and answers about SRKB

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Message-id: <2922677382-6538952@KSL-Mac-69>
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 92  23:49:42 PDT
From: Tom Gruber <Gruber@Sumex-AIM.Stanford.edu>
To: srkb@ISI.EDU
Subject: some questions and answers about SRKB

--- Excerpt from Masahiro HORI (Tue, 04 Aug 92 20:33:35 +0900) ---

> My question and concern are:

>  + Is it assumed that every ontology is written with
>    Ontolingua and KIF?

Certainly not every one that is identified and collected.  For
instance, I am collecting some in LOOM, and translating them into
Ontolingua/KIF.  If we get some from Cyc they are probably
self-explanatory directly in CycL, although CycL can also be
translated into KIF easily.  For those ontologies that are not defined
using declarative constraints (e.g., those whose meaning depends on
attached procedures or methods), it will be harder to achieve our
goals of public access and analysis without doing some
information-changing transformation on the original.

Ontolingua is just a tool to help us put things in a portable format.
We may just add a few more syntactic features to the basic KIF
definition syntax and drop the Ontolingua syntax altogether.  I have
more of a commitment to KIF, as the current proposal for a declarative
interchange language.

>  + As the working group activities, how often will the
>    meetings be held?

I am hesitant to call full group meetings until we have some concrete
proposals for which it is worth bringing people together.  I would
hope we can do most of our work by email.  If the work of subgroups
progresses rapidly, we might have a SRKB meeting at most once a year,
probably associated with a national conference or a spring/fall
symposium. 

>  + In the list of mild organizer, nobody is involved from
>    DARPA/Rome Lab. Planning and Scheduling Initiative.
>    Are there any reason for this ?

The advisory board to the DARPA Knowledge Sharing effort has asked 
Don McKay to represent the DRPI effort, at least as a liason.  He is a
co-chair of the scheduling/planning subgroup.  We have been in contact
with James Allen and Nancy Lehrer about the DRPI ontology, and have
several links to DRPI through ISI people.  It is hoped that the
subgroup on scheduling/planning will define establish some knowledge
sharing experiments that involve the DRPI ontology directly.