[Person-ontology] Ontology Requirements for Distributed Data Sharing

[Pat Hayes]

>All,
>
>	Drummon Reed, a Higgins Project member, asked if we could
>explore this topic:
>
>  	"Another topic area worth exploring is the specific ontology
>requirements for distributed data sharing. It turns out a great deal of
>the current Higgins OWL vocabulary is just for defining metadata
>required for cross-context data sharing. Call it a "domain ontology" for
>a very specialized domain. This isn't a focus of SUMO or any other KIF
>ontology as best I can tell, but it's the first focus of the Higgins
>community, one it must conquer before it can move to using other domain
>ontologies."

While I agree that "cross-context data sharing" is important, I don't 
believe that the Higgins project's approach to it is either necessary 
or desirable, and I would strongly urge that we do not agree to 
follow their approach. IMO, the Higgins project has placed far too 
much emphasis on this aspect, and the result has warped and distorted 
their use of OWL and XSD, which is highly unconventional. It is not 
necessary to "conquer" this (research) problem in its entirety before 
making substantive progress on the actual domain ontology, and 
simpler techniques are useable in practice.

I will defend and elaborate this view if required, but the fact that 
no other deployed SWeb project has found it necessary to "conquer" 
the contextual-metadata issue should be suggestive.

Pat

BTW, the Common Logic (CLIF) syntax allows for a variety of 
alternative approaches to recording context-dependency, including 
modules for describing local domains of discourse and the use of 
contextual names in the form of functions on quoted character strings.

>
>Jim Schoening
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>Person-ontology at idcommons.net
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