Dear Doug,
I have played a little bit with the IKARUS tool, and I thank you
for your efforts to offer to the community a means to establish a
*preliminary*, informal agreement on top-level ontological categories. I
will try to use both IKARUS and ONTOLINGUA to document a top level ontology
of physical objects we are working with: I believe that the two tools can
be seen as sort of complementary, but I am not in the position to comment
on this before having really used both of them. We have now a very fast
internet connection with the States, so things should be easier.
Besides various boring points related to the user interface, there is
however at least one thing that must be fixed: the syntax used for the
slots is ambiguous, since it is not clear whether a slot refers to the
whole class considered as an individual (as in the case of the
"subconcepts" or "edited-by" slots), or rather to the instances of the
class (as in the case of the "children" or "sex" slots). I have somewhere a
note for a syntax proposal to make the semantics of slots clear, I will
send you a note about this.
Cheers
-- Nicola
---------------------------------
Nicola Guarino
National Research Council phone: +39 49 8295751
LADSEB-CNR fax: +39 49 8295778
Corso Stati Uniti, 4 email: guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it
I-35127 Padova
Italy
http://www.ladseb.pd.cnr.it/infor/Ontology/ontology.html
(*** UPDATED 12 March, 1996 ***)