UpperOntologySummit/UosApplicationDialogMeeting 2006 03 15

UpperOntologySummit - Application Dialog Meeting, Wednesday, March 15, 2006, 9 AM- 12 NOON EST

Agenda

Session Details

Subject: Upper Ontology Application Dialog
Session Chair: Dr. Dagobert Soergel
Date: Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Session: 9:00 am - 12:00 noon EST (3 Hours)
Location: Building 227, Conference Room (second floor). See map
- Start Time: 9:00 AM EST / 6:00 AM PST / 14:00 UTC (see world clock for other time zones)
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Prior registration is mandatory. Please refer to UpperOntologySummit/UosApplicationDialogMeeting_2006_03_15/MeetingLogistics for details
- This session, like all our other events, is open to the public. See map

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Please note that this session will be recorded, and the audio archives is expected to be made available as open content to our community membership and the public at-large under our prevailing open IPR policy.

Broader Context

There are a number of extensive upper ontologies in existence today, including SUMO, OpenCyc Upper Ontology, DOLCE, and many others emerging from the OWL community and application areas such as biomedical research. The goal of this summit is to get the "custodians" of the leading existing upper ontologies to agree to a subset, an intersection of these ontologies, that could serve as a core to support interoperability among the future explosively growing population of ontologies.
There is Upper Ontology Developers and Key Participants meeting on March 14th.
There are two Public Meetings on March 15th: this meeting and the formal Summit in the afternoon.

Purposes of Application Dialog Meeting

In addition to the key public upper ontology custodians, organizers, and key participants, stakeholders, early adopters, potential users and potential funders of ongoing upper ontology research development will be invited to discuss mutual concerns.

Agenda

9:20 AM - Welcome and Introductions by the Session Chair - Dagobert Soergel - slides

9:30 AM - Panel of Upper Ontologists present examples of application of upper ontologies

Cyc applications - Doug Lenat - slides
SUMO applications - Adam Pease - slides
ISO 15926 applications - Matthew West - slides
DOLCE applications - Nicola Guarino - slides

10:30 AM - Break

10:50 AM - Open multi-way dialogue of the potential of upper ontologies with triple panel:

Upper ontologists
Stakeholders
Application builders
Panelists:
- Chris Welty
- Michael Uschold
- Conor Shankey
- Mills Davis (talking about Digital Harbor and Metatomix applications)
- Tom Beckman
- DaveMcComb
- John Walker

11:50 AM - Summary and Closing remarks by the Session Chair - Dagobert Soergel

12:00 NOON - ADJOURN

Resources for this UO Appplication Dialog Session

All session resources can be found at the session file repository at: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/UpperOntologySummit/UO-Application-Dialog-session_20050315/
- inlcuded in there are a few audio files with unsatisfactory recording quality. They are appropriately labeled as "bad" ... but parts of their content may still be useful. Feel free to explore.

Some Additional Resources

"Towards the Use of an Upper Ontology" - whitepaper by MITRE

Suggested Upper Merged Ontology

DOLCE and other ontologies developed at the ISTC-CNR Laboratory for Applied Ontology

the OpenCyc Ontology

IEEE P1600.1 Standard Upper Ontology Working Group (SUO WG) Home Page
- Ontology: An ontology is similar to a dictionary or glossary, but with greater detail and structure that enables computers to process its content. An ontology consists of a set of concepts, axioms, and relationships that describe a domain of interest.
- Upper Ontology: An upper ontology is limited to concepts that are meta, generic, abstract and philosophical, and therefore are general enough to address (at a high level) a broad range of domain areas. Concepts specific to given domains will not be included; however, this standard will provide a structure and a set of general concepts upon which domain ontologies (e.g. medical, financial, engineering, etc.) could be constructed.

I find it critical to remember that every ontology is a treaty, a social agreement, among people with some common motive in sharing. What we need the most are ontologies that unleash the potential of the world's population to make useful contributions to our collective knowledge." From Tom Gruber Interview in SIGSEMIS Bulletin

A common subset ontology? --PatCassidy
- Comments --JohnSowa:

That is a much more restricted and a much more achievable goal than a common upper ontology. For most of those things, there already are official standards or de facto standards: 1) The Types for "Named entities"... person names, person titles, company/organization names, geopolitical entity names, locations and geographical places, dates,&,times,,individual events (e.g. World War II), percentages, monetary amounts,,measures One of the first tasks we should do is to compile an inventory with pointers to all the official and de facto standards for the named entities that Pat listed above. Any proposed ontology must accommodate all of them.

A Minimalist Upper Ontology and Gist: Minimalist Upper Ontology -

DaveMcComb

Semantic Wikis try to combine the strengths of Semantic Web (machine processable, data integration, complex queries) and Wiki (easy to use and contribute, strongly interconnected, collaborativeness) technologies - see: http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SICoP/SemanticWikisandInformationManagementWG