PEIRCE CCAT needs coordinator

fritz@rodin.wustl.edu (Fritz Lehmann)
Date: Sat, 4 Jun 94 07:45:09 CDT
From: fritz@rodin.wustl.edu (Fritz Lehmann)
Message-id: <9406041245.AA04796@rodin.wustl.edu>
To: cg@cs.umn.edu, srkb@cs.umbc.edu
Subject: PEIRCE CCAT needs coordinator
Cc: fritz@rodin.wustl.edu, geller@vienna.njit.edu, guha@mcc.com, lenat@mcc.com,
        nicka@mccmedia.com, philip.resnik@east.sun.com,
        poli@risc1.gelso.unitn.it, tony@ontek.com, vet@cs.utwente.nl,
        windy@cse.unsw.edu.au
Sender: srkb-owner@cs.umbc.edu
Precedence: bulk


Dear Gerard,
     You wrote regarding the Conceptual Graphs PEIRCE project:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"I think the best idea is for each co-ordinator to edit [. . .]
    o db	database
	Gerard Ellis
    o ccat	conceptual catalog
	Fritz Lehmann   <-----------------------------!?!What???Egad!!
    o cgc	programmming language
	Gerard Ellis
    o grip	graphical interface
	Peter Eklund
    o ise	information systems engineering
	Peter Creasy
    o learn 	machine learning
	Robert Levinson
    o linear	linear notation interface
	Michel Wermelinger
     [. . .]"                          Gerard Ellis  ged@cs.rmit.edu.au
-----------------[exclamation added]-----------------------------------
     I've kept pointing out publicly on email that there is no co-ordinator
for the "conceptual catalogue" group CCAT in PEIRCE, and again it's listed as
ME!  Let me repeat: CCAT has no coordinator at present, and as far as I know
it never had one.  I would be delighted if some institution would fund my
efforts to do CCAT/PEIRCE full-time, but no brave soul has stepped forward to
offer this.  This is fundamental "ontological-organizational" work and will
require prodigious effort.  It involves creating and importing specific
concept-systems, integrating them, putting them into Conceptual Graphs/PEIRCE
form, and making them available via email/FTP/WWW etc.  Tom Gruber does this
at Stanford for the ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort; I surmise that he is
funded by someone.  Others, also paid, are doing it a ISI, CYC/MCC, Ontek,
Intel-Txt-Proc, UTwente, GE, EITech, Oracle and elsewhere.  CCAT needs
someone good who can devote a lot of time to it and preferably someone with a
dedicated Internet server.  At present, that's not me.

     So far the only CCAT "decisions" I remember have been the following, by
vague consensus at one informal meeting:  1. Put Walling Cyre's system of
time in the "core ontology".  2. Put near-equivalents of the case-relations
and concepts from Appendix B of Sowa1984 in the "core".  3. Begin giving the
PDES/STEP (manufactured objects standards) people the target-concepts they
need. 4. Coordinate with Tom Gruber's ARPA KSE/SRKB/Ontolingua ontologies
(frames, bibliography, measurements, [elevators?], et al.).  5. Coordinate
with IRDS Conceptual Schema (for databases) standard.  6. Try to accommodate
the Penman Upper Model categories for English.  7. See if CYC is interested.
(These are listed in decreasing order of my certainty of memory).  If this is
indeed the agenda, it is already pretty daunting.  (Deep knowledge, rather
than what Sowa rightly disparages as "hyphen-based ontology", requires work.)

     You need someone at a university or with other funding to do this work.

                          Yours truly,   Fritz Lehmann
GRANDAI Software, 4282 Sandburg Way, Irvine, CA 92715, U.S.A.
Tel:(714)-733-0566  Fax:(714)-733-0506  fritz@rodin.wustl.edu
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