Talk:Upper ontology (computer science)

I moved this information from Ontology (computer science) as it seems to deserve its own page. I edited the intro to "Also known as Top Level Ontologies, or Foundation Ontologies

In Information Science, an Upper Ontology is an attempt to create an ontology which describes very general concepts that are the same across all domains. The aim for this is to have a large number on ontologies accessible under this Upper Ontology." I did not edit anything else. --RickiRich 00:06, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. Ontologies are complex topics in themselves and it makes sense to seperate upper ontologies into a separate page. --User:Dmccreary 6:01 am (CDT) January 10, 2006


 * Keep separate. The various "Upper Ontology", "Standard Upper Ontology", "Suggested Upper Merged Ontology", ad nauseum projects are commercial-industrial-military boondoggles that need to be marked off from academic, philosophical, and public domain endeavors.  Jon Awbrey 16:22, 25 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Keep separate. There is enough material to justify separate articles. RayGates 21:08, 5 March 2006 (UTC)


 * This article is definitely necessary. However, so is one on "Lower Ontology". I'm not competent to write it, but it's needed. --LarsMarius 11:56, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

This article needs to be reformed
According to me the sections "Why forcing everyone to use a single shared upper ontology is not practical" and "Why using a single-shared upper ontology is practical" should be moved to the talk page, they are highly subjective in nature and do not contribute to the explanation of what an upper ontology really is about. My first impression when reading was that it was a personal rant on what upper level ontologies are not. Those sections are out of place. Daviddecraene 21:05, 25 August 2006 (UTC)


 * agreed, I've moved them below. There is probably good material in them, but it needs to be rewritten:

Why forcing everyone to use a single shared upper ontology is not practical
The arguments disregard that under normal social conditions (such as the existence of academic and political freedoms) many ontologies will simultaneously exist and compete for adherents. Permanently adopting any single rigid system is unlikely, and probably undesirable in the public interest. That being said, encouraging private efforts to create a highly successful upper ontology that achieves adherents by virtue of its utility is likely to have a socially beneficial result - better communication.

Any effort to encode a useful upper or lower ontology will be characterized by ontological constraints that philosophers have found historically inescapable. Above all, these constraints cast serious doubt on attempts to build a general-purpose upper ontology.


 * There is no self-evident way of dividing the world up into concepts
 * There is no neutral ground that can serve as a means of translating between specialized (lower) ontologies
 * Human language itself is already an arbitrary approximation of just one among many possible conceptual maps. To draw any necessary correlation between English words and any number of intellectual concepts we might like to represent in our ontologies is just asking for trouble. (WordNet is successful and useful precisely because it does not pretend to be a general-purpose upper ontology; rather, it is a tool for semantic / syntactic / linguistic disambiguation, which is richly embedded in the particulars and peculiarities of the English language.)
 * Any hierarchical or topological representation of concepts must begin from some ontological, epistemological, linguistic, cultural, and — above all — pragmatic perspective.

Because any ontology is, among other things, a social / cultural artifact, there is no purely objective perspective from which to observe the whole terrain of concepts. Instead of asking, “what hierarchical representation of concepts best captures the universal relationships among general ideas,” it is more productive to ask “what specific purpose do we have in mind for this conceptual map of entities and what practical difference will this ontology make?” This pragmatic philosophical position surrenders all hope of devising the encoded ontology version of “everything that is the case,” (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus).

According to Barry Smith in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information (2004), "the project of building one single ontology, even one single top-level ontology, which would be at the same time non-trivial and also readily adopted by a broad population of different information systems communities, has largely been abandoned." (p. 159)

How ontologies will be employed in Artificial Intelligence is an open question, but much of what is known about concept acquisition and the social / linguistic interactions of human beings makes it unlikely that a general-purpose ontology is the essential foundation for learning or for achieving an intellect certifiable by the Turing test.

Why using a single-shared upper ontology is practical
While there is no single agreed metaphysics, the very existence of long standing arguments in the field shows that there are a number of models that have fatal flaws. Proponents of an upper ontology argue that while there is not one single true upper ontology, there are in fact several good ones that may be created. The benefits of standardization for communication and sharing suggest that practical system implementers should consider adopting a common upper ontology.

A standard upper ontology would reserve certain terms and their meanings for all systems conforming to the standard. Some would take this to entail that a general ontology (in the philosophical sense) defines 'what exists'. Some also feel that use of the adjective 'upper', in particular, implies a hierarchy one must accept rather than a foundation one can choose, and seems to suggest a cultural impact. Upper ontology creators however believe that an upper ontology simply defines a set of terms that people or software systems may choose to hold in common. At least for SUMO, the potential for cultural bias has been tested by its translation into multiple non-English languages such as Chinese and Hindi, and its use within cultures that speak those languages, resulting in the conclusion by its creators and users that no significant linguistic or cultural biases are evident. Different schools of thought however argue that there is a direct correlation between language and belief systems, however research is required.

The most common conflict among informal ontologies is a difference in language. This difference may be evident even when communities speak the same human language. People have different terms and phrases for the same concept. However, that does not necessarily mean that those people are referring to different concepts. They may simply be using different language. It is essential to separate the language used to refer to concepts from the concepts themselves. Formal ontologies typically use linguistic labels to refer to concepts, but the terms mean no more and no less than what their axioms say they mean. Labels are similar to variable names in software. They should be evocative, but should not be confused with the actual meaning of the name in the context of a formal system.

A second argument is that people believe different things, and therefore can't have the same ontology. However, many differences in belief are simply differences in the truth value of a particular assertion, not in the terms themselves that make up a particular logical assertion. Even arguments about the existence of a thing require a certain sharing of a concept, even though its existence in the real world may be disputed. Separating belief from naming and definition also helps to clarify this issue, and show how concepts can be held in common, even in the face of differing belief.

In summary, most disagreement about the viability of an upper ontology can be traced to the conflation of ontology, language and knowledge. Some additional concerns can be traced simply to the lack of common knowledge about specialized areas of knowledge. This is inescapable. Lack of knowledge does not however entail the impossibility of common ontology but rather points to the fact that many people, or agents or groups will have areas of their respective internal ontologies that do not overlap. The pragmatic issue is that sharing as much as possible is beneficial, and that a vast amount of ontology can be shared.

The definition of a Unified Ontological Framework is perceived as a necessary effort towards the integration and harmonization of diverse ontologies.