I am planning to attend the meeting. I am willing to contribute on the
following two topics:
1. Top level proposal
I have been discussing with Ed Hovy the possibility to drastically reduce
the "tangleness" of current PANGLOSS proposal by keeping disjoint concepts
corresponding to different points of wiew: e.g. instead of having "animal"
as a specialization of both "conscious being" and "physical object", admit
that there is a physical object co-localized with any instance of "animal",
but different from it. The underlying consideration is that animals and
physical objects have different identity criteria. This position has been
discussed in a paper recently presented at the ECAI workshop on
"ontological engineering", entitled "Stratified ontologies: the case of
physical objects" (available via the WWW page reported below).
2. Better characterization of "what is an ontology".
Cheers [leaving for holidays; coming back on Sept 10]
-- 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 2 Aug, 1996 ***)