Bulding a Knowledge-Level 3D Shape Ontology

"Joaquin.A.Delgado" <jdelgado@atr-sw.atr.co.jp>
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 95 18:01:26 JST
From: "Joaquin.A.Delgado" <jdelgado@atr-sw.atr.co.jp>
Message-id: <9507110901.AA04028@cs25.atr-sw.atr.co.jp>
To: interlingua@isi.edu, kqml@cs.umbc.edu, ontolingua@HPP.Stanford.EDU,
        SRKB@isi.edu, madefast@sunrise.stanford.edu, srkb@cs.umbc.edu,
        cg@cs.umn.edu, ckbs@cs.keele.ac.uk, DAI-List@mcc.com,
        distributed-ai-request@mailbase.ac.uk, maamaw@imag.fr,
        takeda@is.aist-nara.ac.jp, nishida@is.aist-nara.ac.jp
Cc: ishii@egg.ics.nitech.ac.jp, yuri@atr-sw.atr.co.jp,
        gulliver@atr-sw.atr.co.jp
Subject: Bulding a Knowledge-Level 3D Shape Ontology
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  Hello,

    I'm involved in a project for creating an "intelligent" virtual
reality system that could be able to use a knowledge-level 3D shape
ontology in order to give "meaning" to virtual objects based on simple
3D-shapes used as primitives. Once the system "knows" what a complex
3D shape is,  knowledge processing can occure and interesting results
can be driven out. 

    For a higher level modelling of the world, knowledge sharing is
desired, either for the reuse of what other ontologies have to offer, or 
for network, distributed "agent-like"  knowledge processing. For that
purpose, and at the design stage of the ontology I would like to 
discuss with you several issues :

1) For some technical reasons we are using NeXPert Object (from
Neuron Data) as the main Knowledge Processing Engine software and we have
ontologies already set up in it's object-oriented, rule-based langange. 
As we wish to reuse existing knowledge, such as Cyc and other ontologies, 
we are now on the crossroad of deciding wich KR language to use in
order to achive our goals. At first galance we have thought in CommonLisp
due to it's expressiveness and because it's widly used, but because we want
to take advantage of what has been done, it seems better to use KIF and
the Online Stanford-KSL ONTOLINGUA system for editing, parsing and checking
the consitancy of our ontologies. KIF can also be integrated easily with
KQML as in Magenta and the ABSI tools, so it also a good reason for using
it for the next step agent processing. The main problem resides in creating 
a KIF to NeXPert translator (as the one existing for LOOM and Cyc). 
Does anyone know if this has been done yet? Or were can I find an API for 
constructing such a translator? Any suggestions?

2) Defining an ontology is definitly not an easy task, therefore I would
like to contact people that have done such work, specially in basic
levels as "things", "shapes", "objects", "components",etc in order to see
how these concepts can be integrated with the underlying mathematical
equations,  used to describe the graphical models of the objects and
there relations in the virtual worlds.

            Any suggestions or comments are fairly welcomed!

Thank You,

Joaquin Delgado                     e-mails: jdelgado@atr-sw.atr.co.jp  
                                             jdelgado@egg.ics.nitech.ac.jp

Artificial Inteligence Department
ATR Communication Systems
Research Laboratories
2-2 Hikaridai Seika-cho Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-02, Japan

Naohiro Ishii's Laboratory, 
Department of Intelligence & Computer Science
Nagoya Institute of Technology
Gokiso-cho, Showa-ku, Nagoya 466, Japan