Re: do you know of

Peter Clark <pclark@cs.utexas.edu>

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From: Peter Clark <pclark@cs.utexas.edu>
Message-id: <199506071738.MAA00684@firewheel.cs.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: do you know of
To: @firewheel.cs.utexas.edu (Fritz Lehmann)
Date: Wed, 7 Jun 1995 12:38:56 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: cg@cs.umn.edu, srkb@cs.umbc.edu
In-reply-to: <9506061754.AA05265@rodin.wustl.edu> from "Fritz Lehmann" at Jun 6, 95 12:54:13 pm
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Fritz -

Re: your thought-provoking observation of the lack of published ontologies.
I agree wholeheartedly with the other circulated comments that that's where
the `meat' really is, and that it's a sorely neglected area. 

But let me add a (maybe unjustified) concern: What I wouldn't like to
now see is a lot of isa-hierarchies published, with little or no information
in the general/top-level concepts. The whole notion of sharable KBs is based 
on the idea of reusable, composable components of knowledge. So what I'd like 
from an ontology paper is a library of components (eg. top-level frames, 
general CGs), and a method for composing them to build the specific 
representation I want (eg. multiple inheritance, maximal join). It's the 
component library, not a specific representation built from it, which is what 
is of interest, and is likely to have the long shelf-life.

For example, your ontology may model a room as a container but I want to
model it as a point location (or person as a thing/process, carpet as
in/partof the room etc.). This ontological distinction isn't really
important (it's a task-dependent question), and shouldn't distract the 
debate -- what is important is that I have the components available in
the first place (ie. a representation of what it *means* to be a "container" 
or a "point location") to be able to build either of these models as needed.

		- Pete

-- 
Peter Clark (pclark@cs.utexas.edu)   Department of Computer Science
tel: (512) 471-9565                  University of Texas at Austin
fax: (512) 471-8885                  Austin, Texas, 78712, USA.
Project homepage: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mfkb