[Person-ontology] first contributions

Sat Oct 6 07:04:02 PDT 2007

So which of the Higgins/Protege top-level model object d you think are not
really needed?

Anthony Nadalin | Work 512.838.0085 | Cell 512.289.4122

  From:       Philippe Martin <phmartin at phmartin.info>                                                                   

  To:         person-ontology at idcommons.net                                                                              

  Date:       10/06/2007 03:57 AM                                                                                        

  Subject:    [Person-ontology]  first contributions                                                                     

Hi everyone,

Content of this email:
1) self-introduction and beliefs;
2) if you need an ontologist, think about me;
3) 1st contribution: the existing Higging ontologies in a
     concise readable format, and loaded in WebKB-2 (hence,
     browsable and updatable by Web Users), plus some comments
     on the content of these ontologies;
4) 2nd contribution: the alternative approach and ontology
     usable in WebKB-2 to represent information about persons.

1) My name is Philippe Martin. I am the author of the shared
large scale knowledge server WebKB-2 (?www.webkb.org) and its
associated "Multi-Source Ontology" (MSO), one of the ontologies
voted as candidate material by the SUO. I unfortunately have
not had much time to improve the MSO since 2003 due to the
closing of the DSTC (my ex research center) and my subsequent
unstable (and not that much research-focused) employment.
I still believe in the need for one big shared consistent
global ontology/KB (otherwise we have a huge number of small
partially redundant, very loosely connected and badly designed
ontologies that are very hard to use/merge ontologies) BUT
- this does NOT mean that people have to agree or even discuss
  with each other (the protocols achieving this in WebKB-2 do
  not enforce agreements but encourage users to explicit the
  semantic relations between partially redundant or
  contradictory beliefs from different users);
- this does NOT mean that there is only one physical KB
  (this only means that distribution mechanisms between the KBs
   ensure that each of them is complete with respect to the
   content of the other KBs regarding its own domain/focus).

2) If you know/offer an ontology related senior research position
now or in the short/long term, please send me an email. My CVs and
research outputs are accessible from http://www.phmartin.info

3) The two attached text documents are representations of the
Higgins ontologies in FL, the most concise format I could
imagine for a notation with "OWL-Full expressivity plus
contexts/meta-statements" (not surprisingly, the RDF/XML versions
provided on the Higgins site do not permit to get a synthetic view
of the content of these ontologies, and I found the Higgins
explanation pages insufficient to get a synthetic view.
HTML versions of these documents (with comments and hyperlinks to
Higgins static pages or WebKB-2 dynamic pages for displaying or
navigating the supertype hierarchy of the ontologies) are at
http://www.webkb.org/kb/nit/physEntity/animate/higgins_person.html
http://www.webkb.org/kb/nit/physEntity/animate/higgins_top_level.html
I added some supertype relations to avoid the violation of some
relation signatures and to connect to Wordnet/WebKB-2 categories.

4) http://www.webkb.org/kb/nit/physEntity/animate/higgins_person.html
also provides comments and hyperlinks to show that an alternative
to the low-level content and approach of the Higgins ontologies (or
those of Protege since most of Higgins' top-level comes from
http://protege.stanford.edu/plugins/owl/owl-library/2005/08/07/xsp.owl)
is possible, available, and both much simpler and more scalable for
knowledge entering and sharing (at least from many viewpoints).
Since the low-levelness of RDF/XML seems to be the reason for the
low-level approach of the Higgins ontologies, some questions this
group could study are:
- are all the objects of the Higgins/Protege top-level model
  really needed?
- how to complement them so that the user does not have to learn
  and use such a low-level model (e.g., how to make kowledge
  entering/display be like in my examples, while keeping the
  low-level model)?

Philippe (www.phmartin.info)

(See attached file: higgins_person.txt)(See attached file:
higgins_top_level.txt)_______________________________________________
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