[Person-ontology] Methodology using an upper ontology

[Pat Hayes]

>Pat and Adam,
>
>I personally am being educated by every message posted to the list. 
>Learning about KIF and CLIF, learning about the relationship of 
>different levels of ontologies, learning about the different 
>approaches to ontology design.
>
>One caveat, however: I sense that the majority of the issues being 
>discussed right now are far ahead of where the Higgins framework is 
>at this point in time. In other words, Higgins is just at the 
>crawling stage when it comes to attribute description and personal 
>data sharing, yet many of the ontology issues you're discussing are 
>at least at the teenage stage, if not young adult. So you just have 
>to be patient with Higgins as it slowly grows up.
>
>Also, wearing my OASIS XDI Technical Committee hat, I'm developing a 
>number of questions about XDI and ontologies. XDI brings a globally 
>addressable graph model to this problem space.

After an admittedly quick read, XRI/XDI seems (?) to be an OASIS 
rival proposal to the W3C semantic web, and indeed to the Web itself. 
If this impression is correct, Im afraid Im more interested in the 
semantic web than in supporting a rival proposal (for example, RDF is 
already a globally addressable graph, no?). But if this impression is 
mistaken, can you briefly orient me to some discussion of how the XDI 
project relates to the W3C SWeb work? And of how XRIs relate to URIs? 
(Not the syntactic conversion, but the intended role/purpose. What is 
the point, for example, of suggesting a 'universal identifier' scheme 
which is incompatible with the universal scheme already in use?)

>This appears to be relevant to both ontology description and sharing 
>as well as to instance description and sharing. However, this 
>capability appears to be orthogonal to the specific ontologies and 
>knowledge representation languages that might be used.

Possibly, though the information embedded into XRIs would be more 
usefully made explicit in RDF ontologies if it is to be used in 
reasoning. Unfortunately the multiple levels of character escaping 
needed to transcribe an XRI as an IRI (described in 2.3.1 of
http://docs.oasis-open.org/xri/xri/V2.0/xri-syntax-V2.0-cd-01.pdf) 
would make it awkward to manipulate "XRI IRIs" to extract this 
meaning automatically.

Pat

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