The Standard Upper Ontology Initiative

1
The Standard Upper Ontology Initiative

• Matthew West

2
Introduction

• What is a formal ontology?
• Who is organising and participating in this
  initiative?
• What progress has been made?
• Where does it look like going?

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What is a Formal Ontology?

• Dictionary
• List of concepts with natural language
  definitions
• Taxonomy
• Concepts structured by specialisation graphs and
  natural language definitions
• Data model/ Description Logic ontology
• Concepts structured by specialisation graphs and
  with formal relationships and natural language
  definitions
• Formal ontology
• As data model, but with arbitrary constraints and
  may include instances. Usually in First Order
  Logic.

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Who is Organising and Participating?

• IEEE P1600.1 Standard Upper Ontology Working
  Group
• Some 70-80 participants from
• Artificial Intelligence
• Linguistics
• SC4
• Electronic working only

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Scope

• This standard will specify an upper ontology that
  will enable computers to utilize it for
  applications such as data interoperability,
  information search and retrieval, automated
  inferencing, and natural language processing. 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. 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.

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Purpose

• A. AUTOMATED REASONING The standard will be
  suitable for automated logical inference to
  support knowledge-based reasoning applications.
• B. INTER-OPERABILITY The standard will provide
  a basis for achieving Inter-Operability among
  various software and database applications.
• 1) Application developers can define new data
  elements in terms of a common ontology, and
  thereby gain some degree of interoperability with
  other conformant systems.
• 2) Applications based on domain-specific
  ontologies that are compliant with this standard
  will be able to interoperate (to some degree) by
  virtue of the shared common terms and
  definitions.
• 3) The SUO will play the role of a neutral
  interchange format whereby owners of existing
  applications will be able to map existing data
  elements just once to a common ontology. This
  provides a degree of interoperability with other
  applications whose representations conform to
  SUO. This entails the SUO being able to be mapped
  to more restricted forms such as XML, database
  schema, or object oriented schema.

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What progress has been made?

• Established December 2000
• Three pieces of work recognised
• IFF Information Flow Framework
• SUMO Suggested Merged Upper Ontology
• OpenCYC

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Information Flow Framework

• Based on Category Theory (theory of
  functions/mapping)
• Provides a basis for mapping and merging
  ontologies in a lattice of theories
• Good progress in developing the theory seems to
  be being made, but it is still somewhat
  impenetrable.

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SUMO

• Written in KIF
• Collection of work from various sources merged
  together
• Doubts about a consistent foundation
• Limited support

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OpenCYC

• A subset of the CYC ontology made publicly
  available
• Similar to but different from SUMO
• Support unknown

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Some key issues

• Single Ontology vs multiple ontology
• Collection of theories
• Single canonical tightly integrated
• Lattice of Theories
• Foundations
• Foundations often indeterminate in existing
  ontologies
• 3D and/or 4D

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Future directions

• I hope
• The IFF work will progress supporting the merging
  and mapping of different ontologies
• SUMO and OpenCYC will gain a better principled
  foundation and will be merged into a 3D ontology
• ISO15926 is adopted as a basis for a 4D ontology
  and is developed by adding axioms and mapped to
  the 3D ontology
• But this will take years not months