Hmm – depends on what you mean by “progress”.
The CYC group originally started as an industry consortium , then after ten
years became a private organization. Its size has varied mostly from
twenty-five to fifty employees. Its early phases depended a lot on
Department of Defense projects. DoD required that CYC release its basic
ontology, which is now freely available as “OpenCYC”. It
full ontology is a lot larger and more sophisticated. More recently, they
completed a several-year project for the Cleveland Clinic, using the ontology
to integrate their many databases. Database integration is probably
the most immediately useful application for an ontology. Problem is, such
projects are always proprietary. We know that a number of companies have
used ontologies (not only CYC, but SUMO and other as well) but we have no
access to the results. There have been proposals to build public-domain
ontologies to demonstrate their use, but those proposals have not been
funded. Money is the main problem. Supporting 25-50 people would be
considered “progress” in my view. I would be curious to know
if anyone is making money from use of the DBpedia ontology. That could be
instructive, if we could see what they are doing.
And the proprietary nature of commercial applications is
precisely the reason that I have spent time building the COSMO ontology.
If the full CYC were public domain, I would just be using it and modifying it,
primarily for Natural Language understanding tasks. As it is,
the COSMO includes much of the top level of OpenCYC, the parts that are not
peculiarly designed for the CYC reasoner. It also includes parts of SUMO,
DOLCE, and a few other top-level ontologies, plus a lot that is not in any of
those ontologies. The function of the COSMO is to enable accurate
interoperability as a public-domain resource – to serve as a common
language for computer applications that use logical inferencing and want to
communicate accurately. To demonstrate that it can function that way,
there needs to be more than one local application that uses it and communicates
with other users. The DBpedia could be one.
The biggest problem in getting local groups to adopt a common
foundation ontology has been the widespread misunderstanding about the nature
of basic ontologies. It is not “impossible” to have one logic-based
computer language to serve as a means of communication between local
applications; it is both possible and necessary, if one wants accurate
communication. Local enterprises build data warehouses to integrate their
databases, and they work fine internally, but cannot communicate with other data
warehouses because they do not rely on a common basic language. If
you want evidence that, when properly motivated, people will all learn a common
language, go to any international scientific conference and try to talk in Urdu
or Warlpiri. The good news about use of a common foundation ontology is
that, in any local group that wants to use it for external communication, there
needs to be only one member who is “bilingual” in both the local
terminology and the common foundation ontology, to translate those elements that
need to be communicated.
If anyone is interested in an objective discussion of how to use
a foundation ontology for interoperability, I will be happy to spend time
explaining the principles. Or one can look at the ppt or Word discussion
at http://micra.com/COSMO. I
would prefer not to engage in rhetorical debates.
Pat
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA Inc.
cassidy@micra.com
908-561-3416
From: wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikidata-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Tom Morris
Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 10:12 AM
To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project.
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Patrick Cassidy <pat@micra.com> wrote: