Communication from Peter Heglich -> .
Communication to SICoP
From Irene Polikoff
Top Quadrant Inc
I think that Jim Schoening's question is very interesting in that it allows us to recognize and explore two fundamentally different viewpoints on the essence and the future of the semantic web.
I am referring to the second question: "Can we achieve cross-domain semantic interoperability without a common upper ontology?"
My understanding of Tim Berners-Lee position is that he believes that semantic interoperability can be achieved without a common upper ontology. In fact, this point is an essential part of his vision of the semantic web. The subway map picture
http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/1023-iswc-tbl/slide10-0.html
is one example of Tim's explaining how it would work and why the semantic web does not require such ontology.
The attempts to develop common upper ontologies have been active for many years, probably nearly twenty now, with so far no success. In some ways Tim's ideas can be seen as a response to this lack of success.
Because it is an important topic on which people have widely varying view points, we have decided to make it one of the key discussion points on the Semantic Interoperability Panel taking place this Wednesday in Palo Alto as part of Semantic Technology event TopQuadrant is co-sponsoring
http://www.sdforum.org/SDForum/Templates/CalendarEvent.aspx?CID=1374
I should be able to report on results of this discussion next week.
Regards,
Irene