A Minimalist Upper Ontology

A title guarenteed to scare off just about everyone: if you're not familiar with work on upper ontologies, the title is just opaque.  If you are familiar, you'll likely thing that the combination of "minimalist" with "upper ontology" is an oxymoron.

So, now that I've gotten rid of all my audience, I can probably say just about anything.  And will.

Let's review our position here.  For two systems to communicate they must commit to a common ontology.  It doesn't matter how elegant or clever your ontology is, if no one else shares it, you don't participate in anything broader than your own ontology.

Given that there are three main positions:

• Wait until you want to integrate, and then build a bridge ontology.  This works, but is numercially exhaustive if you have a lot of other ontologies to link to.
• Integrate on a topic by topic basis.  Use a set of special purpose ontologies to link up.  This is a reasonable strategy and works for a lot of things (geography for instance)
• Commit to an upper ontology early.  If you commit to a very broad upper ontology, you are conceptually linked to anyone else who does.

For some that third strategy is very appealling.  And there are some options to choose from here, most notably Cyc and SUMO.  But, there is also a dark side.  Any time you commit to an ontology, you agree to be bound by all the assertions made in that ontology.  If nothing else, you need to review them, understand them, and determine whether committing to them will cause problems.

As  a result, the most popular shared ontologies to date have been narrow scope upper ontologies, such as Dublin Core for documents, FoaF for contact lists and interests, and RSS for news feeds.  What they all share is a small set of concepts, and relatively few constraints.

I have postulated, built and will present what I call a "minimalist upper ontology."  That is, it is very broad in scope, comparable to the large upper ontologies (in this case I am trying to cover commercial information systems, so most of the corporate and government systems, but not games, compilers, embedded or scientific systems).  But I have tried to mimic the size of the more popular ontologies: there are about 50 concepts in this ontology.   I bleive there are immediate benefits for projects adopting it just to remove ambiguity from their definitions.  But longer term I think it sets a basis for much broader scale cooperation.

I think I'm on to something here. And it will only be of value if it is shared.  So, I will be presenting it at the Semantic Technology Conference, if you can make it Wed afternoon it is called "Gist: Minimalist Upper Ontology."  If you are not able to make it to the conference it will be available shortly thereafter, I will have white papers and the ontology itself will be available for free download.  Avaliable now at http://gist-ont.com/ 

I'm eager to get feedback on this project. 

Comments

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[Colleen Downing]

Dave, can you recommend upcoming conferences that are similiar in technical nature to the semantic technology conference that might be occurring in the next few months? I have a government client that would like to attend one of these semantic conferences. Unfortunately they were not able to attend the semantic tech conference this year.

Sincerely,
Colleen Downing

[Dave McComb]

Nova (and anyone),
I'm presenting the ontology and the justification behind it this afternoon at the conference. In the meantime the OWL file, and a copy of the presentation are available at the link above (gist-ont.com).

I would love to hear your feedback. I've tried to emphasizee ease of understanding and ease of adoption over a lot of other concerns, including rigorous proof and fine grained precision. So let me know if it fits your expectation in that regard.

Dave

[Nova Spivack]

Hi Dave, I would be very interested to take a look at the ontology. Is there an OWL file or Protege project I can download? I worked on the Clib upper ontology with University of Texas Austin, for the SRI DARPA CALO project. I still haven't found an upper ontology that is EASY to use. Maybe you've solved that?

Nova

[Dan McCreary]

I agree that for basic interoperability issues, a simple upper ontology makes integration using graphical mapping tools MUCH more straightforward. I am looking forward to attending your presentation to see how GIST compares with the DOJ/DHS NIEM standard. NIEM is based on GJXDM which uses a very simple ADOP (Activity, Document, Organization, Person) structure. It seems like many documents that need to be sent between organizations can start with these conceptual data elements and grow. Combining these structures with ISO-11179 naming standards, namespaces and a well-written data element definition really has made integration much easier for me. This is admittedly low-tech approach but with very high ROI. A widely-adopted semantic wiki for tracking metadata usage with good statistical reports could show what data elements are in fact used the most often and what data elements should be included in a GIST.

I am looking forward to your presentation! - Dan

[Dave McComb]

Yeah, bummer about that geospatial temporal problem you've got with your personal upper ontology that prevents you from being at two places at once. Me too.

You are right, and I have been doing a lot of that. I find huge value in retracing the footsteps of others, especially at the design level. But at the run time level we really are going to have to import and commit to some shared ontologies to get any kind of federation of information going.

[David Allen]

Dave, I'd love to attend this session, if I wasn't presenting at the same time in another room. :)

Anyway, I do think this is an idea worth exploring. I would add though that when you say "use a minimalist upper ontology" you don't necessary have to import all of the definitions and constraints into the actual ontology you're using. I have found upper ontologies very useful as reference points even in just the documentation. This can serve as a disambiguation.

Example: I have a concept "Foot" in my ontology. By associating it (either formally or just by a reference in the documentation) as like a SUMO concept, it can tell you which kind of foot I mean. Two possible SUMO concepts: Entity -> Physical -> Object (the thing attached to your leg) and Entity -> Abstract -> Quantity -> Physical Quantity (i.e. foot as a unit of measure). Maybe for some other reason, you don't think length is these, perhaps for your purposes it's an Entity -> Abstract -> Relation -> Spatial Relation. (i.e. a foot describing the relationship of being 12 inches separated from something else) If so, note that. Categorizing your concepts in this way illuminates your biases and intentions for using the concepts in practice.

One cheap and quick way to define a minimalist upper ontology would be "take your favorite upper ontology (such as SUMO) and use only the first X layers" where X is a small number, perhaps 4. In that case, with SUMO you might consider Entity -> Abstract -> Quantity -> Number as your most granular upper ontology concept, and you wouldn't go to the length of Entity -> Abstract -> Quantity -> Number -> ImaginaryNumber. That could be problematic depending on how the upper ontology is modeled, but it's a quick bootstrap.