[Person-ontology] What about a de facto upper ontology?

[Drummond Reed]

Jim,

This is exactly the scenario that I believe the combination of Higgins and XDI can enable. I am not a full-time ontologist (yet ;-), but here's a simple analogy for what may happen: when HTML was first developed, it was a poor bastard stepchild of SGML, the mother of all markup languages. But because HTML provided something very simple but highly useful, it took off, and now I would venture to say there's orders of magnitude more content in HTML (and its follow-on, XML) than in SGML.

I think Higgins and XDI can provide that same sort of jet fuel for ontology use and sharing.

One thing I am eager to explore soon is how the XDI RDF model's very simple upper ontology -- you might even call it a tiptology ;-) -- might help do for more powerful upper ontologies what HTML did for SGML. (But first I must help put the XRI Resolution 2.0 Committee Draft 02 specification to bed, which will occupy me for another two weeks.)

=Drummond

> -----Original Message-----
> From: person-ontology-bounces at idcommons.net [mailto:person-ontology-
> bounces at idcommons.net] On Behalf Of Schoening, James R Mr CIV USA AMC
> Sent: Monday, October 15, 2007 8:10 PM
> To: person-ontology at idcommons.net
> Subject: [Person-ontology] What about a de facto upper ontology?
>
> All,
>
>         Several members have stated their concerns about there ever
> being a single upper ontology.  I can understand opposition to a
> standards developing organization (e.g. ISO or IEEE) passing a standard
> upper ontology.
>
>         But suppose the open source Higgins project were to utilize a
> given upper ontology as a foundation for it Person-Ontology, and suppose
> Higgins became a big market success, which led to many vendors using the
> same upper ontology, which led to market-momentum for the upper
> ontology.
>
>         For those opposed to a standard upper ontology, what are your
> thoughts on the emergence of a market-driven de facto upper ontology?
>
> Jim Schoening
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