At Bob Spillers's request, I sent the attached invitation to various key
members of the EAGLES group of projects throughout Europe.
EAGLES includes the people building EuroWordNet. The projects are funded
by Language Engineering in Brussels (akin to DARPA in size and scope, when
it comes to language and knowledge representation). The grandfather of
EAGLES is Prof. Antonio Zampolli from Pisa.
Your comments appreciated!
E
To: pisa@ilc.pi.cnr.it, Piek.Vossen@let.uva.nl, glottolo@ilc.pi.cnr.it,
antonio.sanfilippo@sharp.co.uk, pdiez@uax.es, yorick@dcs.sheffield.ac.uk
Dear Ontologist!
This is a description of a workshop to be held on Ontologies at Stanford
University in November and an invitation to attend it. Please feel free
to circulate this letter among your colleagues.
In light of your work on EuroWordNet and the other parts of the EAGLES
and similar projects, Bob Spillers asked me to invite you to the meeting
of the ANSI Ad Hoc Group on Ontology Standardization, so that we can
learn more about your very interesting work, and can discuss ways of
collaborating.
The workshop is the fourth in the series of bi-annual meetings of the
ANSI Ad Hoc Group, originally convened by Bob Spillers of IBM Santa
Teresa (California) and held as follows:
March 96 -- IBM Santa Teresa
October 96 -- Stanford University
March 97 -- ISI
November 97 -- Stanford University
Unfortunately, since there is no funding for this group, nor any projects
formally associated with it, we cannot offer any financial assistance.
We have had interesting meetings in the past, and recent work under
DARPA's HPKB effort by several members of the Group means that we are
likely to have another interesting meeting this time. Much of this work
is related to the HPKB Jumpstart effort, whose aim is to provide a
medium-sized ontology with considerable domain knowledge to support
reasoning. In particular,
- Adam Farquhar and group at Stanford's KSL have been working on
automatically extracting information from the CIA Fact Book to
be included into the HPKB Jumpstart Ontology;
- Fritz Lehmann and others at CYC have been working on creating
a portion of CYC for public release and a further portion, with
axioms, for use within Jumpstart;
- Eduard Hovy and others at ISI have been working to align the
topmost regions of the ontologies SENSUS/Pangloss (from ISI),
MIKROKOSMOS (from New Mexico State University), CYC, and EDR,
using automated and manual techniques;
- John Sowa has been developing a set of case roles and proposing a
structure for the very top of a proposed merged quasi-standard
Ontology;
- Lee Auspitz and others at TextWise Inc. have been working on the
automated extraction of ontological information from text;
- and so on.
This meeting is probably going to last for two days, the first being devoted
to feedback about the abovementioned projects, and the second to a workshop
devoted to technical details (assuming enough interest), as proposed by Nicola
Guarino. The precise agendas are still being made.
Administrative coordination:
Location: Stanford University
Dates: November 6 and 7
Local information (hotels, etc.): Bob Engelmore (rse@hpp.stanford.edu)
ANSI information: Tony Sarris (tony@ontek.com)
Best wishes, and we really hope to see you there!
E
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Eduard Hovy
email: hovy@isi.edu USC Information Sciences Institute
tel: 310-822-1511 ext 731 4676 Admiralty Way
fax: 310-823-6714 Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
project homepage: http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/nlp-at-isi.html