Re: do you know of

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Date: Tue, 6 Jun 95 12:54:13 CDT
From: fritz@rodin.wustl.edu (Fritz Lehmann)
Message-id: <9506061754.AA05265@rodin.wustl.edu>
To: doug@csi.uottawa.ca
Subject: Re:  do you know of
Cc: cg@cs.umn.edu, fritz@rodin.wustl.edu, srkb@cs.umbc.edu
Sender: owner-srkb@cs.umbc.edu
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Dear Doug,

     Sorry, I do not know of any other citations on the meta-level capabilities
of KIF.  Recently KIF has been cut down closer to FOL; I think the latest
KIF-only standard might not allow even weakly higher-order relations (?). 
My impression from the public non-responsiveness to outsiders'
critical comment on KIF is A. The real discussions of KIF take place on
a private, "inner circle" KIF mailing list, and B. Public criticism/feedback
on KIF is regarded as being an attack in a competitive environment,
and is thus not always totally appreciated.  I am pro-KIF and intend to
use it along with Conceptual Graphs, but the KIF "administration" seems
problematic.

     On another topic:  I am struck by the fact that _none_ of the
papers I reviewed for your ontology workshop (nor my own paper) was mainly
about an ontology.  There was lots on how to generate them, evaluate
them, combine them, etc., but no paper I reviewed dealt mainly with the  
ONTOLOGY ITSELF (unlike some of your papers which actually bite the bullet,
or CYC and Penman).  There still seems to be this bashfulness, that for
some reason it is "unscientific" (or maybe "unmanly") to present
the actual ontology as the main point of interest.  Maybe it is just
the selection of papers I happened to review, or maybe there is still
a widespread mental/academic obstacle to presenting an ontology as
a piece of scientific or engineering work.

     This point is striking enough to me that am going to post a copy
of this message to the srkb ontologies list, for possible comment.

     On Mario Bunge: I don't know his work yet; I'm going to take a look
at his books: Ontology I & II, The Furniture of the World and The World of 
Systems.

                          Yours truly,   Fritz Lehmann
GRANDAI Software, 4282 Sandburg Way, Irvine, CA 92715, U.S.A.
Tel:(714)-733-0566  Fax:(714)-733-0506  fritz@rodin.wustl.edu
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