Talk:Upper ontology

Arguments for the infeasibility / feasability of an upper ontology
Both these sections are opinion pieces written as fact. For example, many supporters of relativism would dispute the positivist tone of "If any two assertions about the real world are logically inconsistent, one or both must be wrong."

It would be better to say "Many who believe that an upper ontology is possible would say that if any two assertions about the real world are logically inconsistent, one or both must be wrong."

These sections should be re-written to describe the points of argument, not make statements as if they are facts.

Perhaps both sections should be deleted until they are updated, including citing sources. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Badja (talk • contribs) 02:32, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

(PROTON)
TODO: We should have a mention of the PROTON upper ontology model here.  (Olimatis (talk) 20:35, 26 November 2008 (UTC))

(DOLCE)
The DOLCE link (to the DOLCE pdf) is dead. Suggesting we use this link instead: http://www.loa-cnr.it/DOLCE.html --Seymoure Frye (talk) 08:32, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

I did a Google search for "upper ontology" site:en.wikipedia.org and came up with a few more candidates.

(Gellish)
Most likely candidate.

From the article: "The upper ontology part of Gellish currently consists of more than 1500 concepts of which about 650 are standard relation types. In addition to that the Gellish Dictionary-Taxonomy contains more than 40,000 concepts."

(MOD Ontology)
From the article: "The MOD Ontology is the name given to the upper ontology intended to support the UK Ministry of Defence's Enterprise Architecture Programme, specifically MODAF."

(OntoCAPE)
From the article: "OntoCAPE is a large-scale ontology for the domain of Computer-Aided Process Engineering (CAPE). It can be downloaded free of charge from the OntoCAPE Homepage"

(ThoughtTreasure)
Defunct but of historical interest?

From the article: "ThoughtTreasure contains a total of 27,000 concepts and 51,000 assertions. It has an upper ontology and several domain-specific lower ontologies such as for clothing, food, and music." and " History ThoughtTreasure was begun by Erik Mueller in December 1993. The first version was released on April 28, 1996. Mueller established the company Signiform in 1997 to pursue commercial applications of ThoughtTreasure. However, the company was unsuccessful and Signiform closed its doors in 2000. In 2000, Erik Mueller moved to IBM Research, where he was a member of the team that developed Watson (computer). On July 31, 2015, ThoughtTreasure was made available on GitHub. "

(GNOWSYS)
Least likely candidate.

GNU software to explore semantic computing that is not even released yet and whose Wikipedia article appears to have been written by the authors of the software. I found one sentence lifted wholesale from the project description page.

--Golden herring (talk) 10:37, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Quote about ontological warfare
My quote about ontological warfare was given at GCA 1999 in Philadelphia:

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/1999/12/xml99/wrapup.html

I don't have the quote on paper, but I hope this mail is sufficient evidence Petermr (talk) 23:27, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

This is a better link where the phrase is abstracted by a respected third party: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/1999/12/xml99/keynote.html Petermr (talk) 17:35, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Rewriting without essay style
As of January 2012, the article had gained more essay-like wording, where it even waxed about the problems of religious schisms, warfare, societies that "have computers at all" or medieval Europe. Perhaps whole sentences should be removed or trimmed, as being off-topic tangents, which distract from the specific topic of "upper ontology". While the essay-like tone is common for academic discussions or other topics in the Theory of Knowledge, the tone of Wikipedia articles needs to be more narrow. Otherwise, there would be no end to various analogies about activities in "medieval Europe" or such. The article needs to be rewritten to keep it short and focused. See: WP:TONE. -Wikid77 (talk) 13:13, 28 January 2012 (UTC)


 * I agree in general, however I think that there are a lot of good points made in the section and that these points belong in the article. The big problem is the lack of sources. Some of this critique can be found in cognitive science -- maybe George Lakoff? Hubert Dreyfus should be cited from philosophy, as his critique of knowledge-based AI is very coherent and influential. I think the post-modernist critique (i.e. the part that sounds almost political) should be covered and deserves a paragraph, but this desperately needs a citation. I don't know this literature at all. Did Foucault or Derrida ever address the problems of AI?


 * One of the great strengths of Wikipedia is that articles must bring together viewpoints from across the academic and philosophical spectrum. This is part of WP:NPOV, and the article should have sections that address the topic from outside of its own narrow field.


 * Having defended the ideas, I agree that the writing sounds like the author was just making stuff up. It needs to be tightened and each point needs a source, especially in a section that discusses controversial ideas that are likely to be challenged. CharlesGillingham (talk) 04:26, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
 * I haven't read the article carefully but I strongly disagree that references to people like Lakoff, Dreyfus, or Foucault have any relevance to this article. If the article were about Artificial Intelligence in general then yes, such references would be appropriate but it's not. It's about a very specific topic within the field. There are tens, maybe hundreds, of articles like this: Inference engine, Expert system, Knowledge based system, Knowledge Based Software Assistant,... just to pick a few off the top of my head. Are we supposed to have general criticisms of AI on every one of those articles? None of those people would even know what an upper model is let alone have anything meaningful to say about them. I'm not against having criticism of the concept of an Upper Model, in fact just to state my bias, I'm very skeptical about them, I just don't think going to people who write philosophical criticisms of AI are in any way appropriate. John Sowa is someone who is well known in AI and has written some excellent critiques of Upper Models (I actually came to this page because it was mentioned in an online AI forum with Sowa and others). If I have time I'll look into some references from Sowa and others that are pro and con of the topic and add them. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 21:46, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

I removed the article level tag. Just reviewed the first of the two Argument sections, didn bother with the second. Suggest they just be removed or move to a separate article. Lycurgus (talk) 19:54, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Enforcement of inclusion criteria
There appears to be precedent that any entry in the list be removed as soon as its main article is deleted, but this doesn't seem to have been done at least for DOLCE and COSMO. Any objections before we start removing content?

Or am I misunderstanding the inclusion criteria for the list? What should be done to enforce said criteria? --SoledadKabocha (talk) 04:21, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

Table
The table seems to lack a horizontal line. 81.135.40.247 (talk) 22:22, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Adding External Links section
I noticed that there is at least one link (to http://micra.com/COSMO/) to a site outside of Wikipedia within the body of the article. This is not in accord with the External links policy. I'm adding a new section for External links and moving the Cosmo link there and then removing them from the article body. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 21:58, 9 May 2019 (UTC)
 * My mistake, there already is an External Links section but it was below the references which is not standard so I didn't see it at first. I moved it to before the refs, added a link to COSMO, and removed the external link to COSMO from the body of the article. I also rewrote the text for COSMO so that rather than having the external link there it points people to the section at the end. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 22:08, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

Strange Section with no lead-in
'Ethically, any general-purpose ontology could quickly become an actual tyranny by recruiting adherents into a political program designed to propagate it and its funding means, and possibly defend it by violence. Historically, inconsistent and irrational belief systems have proven capable of commanding obedience to the detriment or harm of persons both inside and outside a society that accepts them. How much more harmful would a consistent rational one be, were it to contain even one or two basic assumptions incompatible with human life?'

This seemingly came out of nowhere in the flow of the article, we were talking about universality of concepts, a very abstract idea and just suddenly took a turn into the topic of political violence without any appropriate lead-in or any supporting articles or links? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.197.199.89 (talk) 00:20, 29 March 2024 (UTC)