I think this is good. Using upper levels to guide towards good
choices of properties is very useful.
robert.
At 13:29 13/06/2006, Matthias Samwald wrote:
> One small, but significant, dislike of the bio-ontology community
> for SUMO (as used by Solditova and King) is that it isn't really
> only an upper level. It strays into, for instance, stating a
> protein is a foodstuff. this, as you might suppose, causes
> biologists to laugh.
That is very true, and I think that the importance of having huge
top-level ontologies like SUMO or maybe Cyc is largely overrated.
On the other hand, having very small and basic foundational
ontologies (e.g. the most basic ontologies of the DOLCE lite
ontology, BFO or SKOS) is more important than most developers of
ontologies seem to think. It is a great aid to the development of
interoperable ontologies to have a common, basic framework of
classes (e.g. physical-object, perdurant, quality) and properties
(e.g. part-of, participant-in).
These basic ontologies do not need to be large or complicated to be
useful (around 20 classes and properties are sufficient, I guess).
Quite to the contrary, making these foundational ontologies too
complicated would significantly decrease their usefulness.
//Matthias Samwald
