All agreed, but what's out there now?

fritz@rodin.wustl.edu (Fritz Lehmann)
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 95 18:06:52 CDT
From: fritz@rodin.wustl.edu (Fritz Lehmann)
Message-id: <9506082306.AA11191@rodin.wustl.edu>
To: cg@cs.umn.edu, srkb@cs.umbc.edu
Subject: All agreed, but what's out there now?
Cc: fritz@rodin.wustl.edu
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     It's nice to have prompted such harmonious accord on content-over-form
from Lenat, Hovy, Cassidy, Skuce, Sowa and Feigenbaum, but I would like to ask
these people about "what is out there" right now in available ontological
content.

     At the La Jolla ontology meeting last year, Doug Lenat and Guha announced
the impending public availability of the entire Cyc hierarchy (stripped of
most of the proprietary inference mechanisms) by last year's end.  Doug
mentioned in his recent message that few have taken this up.  I never saw an
announcement of any means of accessing the hierarchy  -- how do we get it?

     For the Pangloss Ontology, the same question.  Kevin Knight at AAAI-94 in
Seattle, and he and Ed Hovy at La Jolla, announced the availability of the
entire Pangloss Ontology (stripped of the copyrighted Longman Dictionary
information).  I've seen a diagram of the "upper model" ("Ontology Base") but
not the main ontology itself -- how do we get it?

     Pat Cassidy's original Roget hierarchy is available by FTP and World
Wide Web from the Gutenberg project and many other sites, but the important

work he is doing on conceptual revision and specification of the relations in
the hierarchy is available from him directly at cassidy@micra.com, as
indicated in his recent message.

     If I remember rightly, Doug Skuce's upper level ontology is available
only in his Smalltalk-based CODE4 language, which has to be licensed (?).

     Wordnet is available from Princeton over the internet by FTP from
clarity.princeton.edu in directory pub/ (or for $25.00 for PC or Mac floppy
disks).

     John Sowa's current ontological building blocks are in some unpublished
chapters of his forthcoming book.  They have not been put in CCAT, and CCAT is
not nearly ready to be put on the Peirce Project FTP sites.

     Pat Hayes' time ontology-suite has not been put into CCAT form, nor in
Ontolingua-compatible/available KIF form at the Stanford ontology site.  It's
a Technical Report at present.

     Edward Feigenbaum discloses having the Chief Scientist position with the
U.S. Air Force.  I imagine that the Air Force has implemented versions of
several generally useful ontologies, including the latest version of the
ARPA/Rome Planning Ontology and some based on KIF.  How do we get them?  Also,
I speculate that the Air Force is a participant in the comprehensive Army Data
Model  DoD-wide data meta-dictionary (which ought to have an ontological
semantic basis); where do we get the current version of that?

     The Stanford repository of Ontolingua/KIF-based mini-ontologies is at
http://ksl-web.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/ontologies/html/ for the Web or
ftp://ksl.stanford.edu/pub/knowledge-sharing/ontologies for FTP access.  The
UMLS Medical Metathesaurus and Semantic Network are available on CD-ROM for
free by research license from Betsy Humphreys at the National Library of
Medicine, FAX 301-496-4450.  I don't know that the proprietary ontologies of
General Electric, Oracle, Ontek, Siemens-Nixdorf, Enterprise Integration
Technologies, Longman's-Lexicon or Intelligent Text Processing Inc. (or the
Lilog Dusseldorf ontology or Bruce Porter et al.'s botany hierarchy) are
publicly available.  Some library classification taxonomies are.

     If ANYBODY ELSE reading these SRKB and CG email lists has an available,
potentially generally useful ontology, in any machine-readable form, please
post to these lists the means of getting it.  I realize that "available" does
not necessarily mean that you want your ontology anonymously downloaded by
the world-wide "Great Unwashed"; you may prefer to know and license the people
using it, or you may not.


                          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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