As part of the book, Appendix B has a list of "principles", which are
based on the discussions we have had during the past year or so together
with the top-level categories that I have been putting together and the
thematic roles that Ed Hovy and I have agreed on. There are a number of
points in this package that I would like to discuss with the group.
There is also another topic of interest: Two weeks ago, I visited
Klaus Tschirra and Ken Haase at the new European Media Lab (EML),
which is being funded by a foundation set up by Tschirra (from his
dividends as a cofounder of SAP, the fifth largest software company
in the world and the largest outside of the US).
Ken Haase, who is still affiliated with the MIT Multimedia Lab, is working
with Tschirra in Heidelberg to get the new lab going. So far MIT, HP,
and Langenscheidt (the German dictionary company) have signed up as partners
with EML. While I was there, I had a long discussion with Klaus and Ken
about ontology as central to knowledge bases, databases, and related
systems. They agreed that ontology should be one of the major topics
that EML should address.
Ken will be back in the US at the end of October, and I suggested that
he should visit the T2 meeting in November. I think that it would be
appropriate for him to tell the group something about what EML is, what
it plans to do, and how it could cooperate with us in the ontology efforts.
I think that there is sufficient material to have a full day on ontology
(say on Wednesday Nov 5) just before the main business meeting of T2.
Mike Genesereth and I will be involved with the KIF and CG standards,
which we plan to present to the T2 group on Thursday (with voting
on Friday). Those people who are primarily interested in ontology
can either sit in on those meetings or continue to work on further
ontology issues in small groups.
John Sowa