Monday, November 21, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
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ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group
It is a working group of
Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)
Communication to the working group
from Nicolas Rouquette
John Sowa’s idea to is “Shift attention from the unsolvable problem of building, merging, and coordinating global world views to the task of developing an open-ended collection of modules that can be selected, assembled, and tailored for particular tasks or collections of tasks. ”For that to happen, we need ways to specify such modules in terms of:
a) some kind of calculus for selecting, assembling, tailoring, etc...
b) an explicit notion of intended purpose that an external agent can attribute to a module
It would be difficult to do (a) within a single global world view because we lack conceptual and relational redundancy to make useful comparisons, claims of similarity, equivalence, etc...
In contrast, having multiple perspectives and points of view yields redundancies for specifying concepts & their relationships. In this case, it is natural to develop some kind of calculus to adjudicate which redundancies are OK vs. inconsistent/incompatible or undesirable in some way.
Perhaps in an abuse of the term, the problem faced in ONTAC seems to me an issue of meta-ontology:
- how do we specify the context/scope of a module?
In a conventional approach, a module might be specified as a set of tasks and define the ontological concepts/relations pertaining to these tasks. Another strategy might focus on the ontological concepts/relations in the module which would provide a vocabulary to define tasks.
A cleaner alternative might be to recognize that task vocabularies and module concept vocabularies are orthogonal and the meaning of these vocabularies is defined by the axioms that link them in an integrated task/module ontology. This is more or less what's happening in highly axiomatized ontologies anyway:
- PSL (e.g., activity vs. activity occurrence)-
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DOLCE (e.g., situation vs. description)-
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SNAP/SPAN (e.g., function vs. functioning)-
- Barry's document ontologies (e.g., allegoric vs. autographic docs)