From: Adam Pease (apease@ks.teknowledge.com)
Date: 03/06/03
Jerry, Teknowledge would certainly be interested in participating. There's a good deal of material in our Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) as well as in the Terrain Ontology that extends SUMO, that should be relevant. Both are freely available from <http://ontology.teknowledge.com>. We expect to release a number of additional extensions in the coming months. Adam At 12:28 PM 3/6/2003 -0800, Jerry Hobbs wrote: >This is a message I sent out about a month ago to a haphazard list of >people (basically, the people whose email addresses I had at hand). >The present message is an attempt to send it to a more complete set of >the appropriate people. > >You probably all know about the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML), >DARPA's contribution to bringing the Semantic Web into reality. As >part of that project, some of us have been developing ontologies, not >necessarily as standards, but as resources that can be used for a wide >variety of purposes. Two efforts so far have concerned services >(DAML-S: http://www.daml.org/services/) and time (DAML-Time: >http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~ferguson/daml/). They are at different >stages of maturity. DAML-S has been under development for two years >and DAML-Time for one. > >When I talked about the DAML-Time ontology at the last DAML meeting, >Murray Burke (DARPA program manager) said it would be great for some >people to get together and do a DAML-Space ontology as well. This >message is an attempt to organize such an effort. > >The aim of this ontology would not be to drive out any other work on >spatial ontologies, but to provide a way for different spatial >reasoning engines and spatial resources to communicate with each >other, as well as a way for people to mark up the spatial information >on their web sites. The goals of the effort would be to produce an >ontology that would > > 1. Enable general, though not necessarily efficient, reasoning > about spatial concepts. > > 2. Link with more efficient specialized reasoning engines for > spatial reasoning. > > 3. Link with the numerous databases that exist containing a > wealth of specific, e.g., geographical, spatial information. > > 4. Support convenient query capabilities for spatial > information. > >The topics we would want to cover include the following (where I've >listed the corresponding topics that DAML-Time covers): > > Space Time > ----- ---- > > Topological relations Topological relations > (e.g., RCC8) (e.g., interval algebra) > > Dimension -- > > Shape -- > > Length, area and volume Duration > > Latitude, longitude, elevation Clock and calendar > > Political subdivisions -- > >Please feel free to comment on this list, especially about things that >are missing. > >Much of the work will be focused on geographical knowledge, but the >intent is not to restrict ourselves to this domain alone. Topological >spatial relations are important in microbiology, for example. Other >application areas that have been suggested are the geology of >earthquakes, NASA applications, computer graphics, and virtual reality. > >Of course to do a thorough spatial ontology is an immense job. I >think we can restrict what we need to do by limiting ourselves to >_linking_ with resources, rather than _duplicating_ them. For >example, we would want to be able to interface with a resource on the >shapes of geographical regions, but we would not need to encode its >internal representations. > >As with DAML-Time, the aim would be to construct an ontology that >accomodates many perspectives on controversial issues rather than >forces a particular perspective. As with DAML-Time, the strategy >would be to construct an abstract ontology in first-order logic, and >implement whatever part of that can be implemented in the DAML of the >day. > >Let me know if you would be interested in participating in such an >effort, at least as far as tracking the email. But in fact, I will >keep you on the list unless you send me a message to remove you. > >An archived mail list has been set up to facilitate discussion related >to geo-spatial ontologies. The archive is at www.daml.org/listarchive. >To subscribe to the mailing list, send an email message to >majordomo@daml.org with the text "subscribe daml-spatial" in the body >of the message. > >If you can think of other people who should be involved, send me their >names and email addresses, and/or forward this to them. > >Please suggest any research and applications you think should be taken >into account. It would also be extremely helpful to develop a set of >challenge problems of varying levels of difficulty to help drive the >development of the ontology. Also if you think any of your papers >would aid in this effort and might otherwise be missed, please feel >free to send pointers to them. > > >-- Jerry Hobbs
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