SCOOP - System For Collaborative Open Ontology

Production

“A Knowledge Management tool that understands the content it manages.”

AAAI-SSS AMKM26 March 2003

Adam Pease, John LiTeknowledge[apease | jli]@teknowledge.com

http://projects.teknowledge.com/RKFhttp://ontology.teknowledge.com

System Overview

Formal Ontology

Theorem Prover

Simple Workflow

Language Interface

GUI

Problem Addressed

• Developers need to know whether they– Share content with other developers– Conflict with other developers’ content

What’s New

• Using theorem-proving to maintain consistency among KEs/SMEs– Vertical Consistency – consistency

among theories used by a single developer

– Horizontal Consistency – consistency among theories created by several developers

• Building on existing SCOOP workflow, coordination and voting support

Consistency Support

• Redundancy results in warnings– Redundacy among developers triggers

suggestion for statement lifting– Lifting results in redundant statement being

moved to a common file/theory

• Contradiction results in errors– Users must retract contradiction among his own

files/theories– Users may keep contradictions with respect to

other developer’s files, at the price of prohibiting further diagnostics with respect to those files

Voting

• Majority vote• Author’s vote is a tie-breaker• Other weighted voting schemes

easily adopted

Dimensions of Knowledge

FOL

CandidateInferences/Statements

StructuredDialogs

StructuredSources

EnglishStatements

TextDocuments

Form

ality

Tim

e

Person/Source/Domain

Knowledge Compartments

Knowledge Modules

Knowledge Versions

Benefits of history

Regression to earlier versions problematic content can be removed

and the system returned to an earlier state

Change tracking track the evolution of system

components understand why things were done understand how system must be modified to

support other changes

System Overview

Formal OntologyTheorem Prover

Simple Workflow

Language Interface

GUI

SUMO

• Incorporates over 50 publicly available sources of high-level ontological content

• Available in KIF (first order logic), DAML and LOOM

• May be used without fee for any purpose (including for profit)

• Refined extensively on the basis of input from SUO mailing list participants

• Mapped by hand to all 100,000 WordNet synsets

• 47 publicly released versions created over two years (approximately 1,000 concepts, 4000 assertions, and 750 rules so far)

What’s in the SUMO?

• Structural Ontology • Set/Class Theory• Number Hierarchy• Quantities and Units of Measure• Biological Taxonomy• Temporal Concepts• Mereotopology

SUMO Structure

Structural Ontology

Base Ontology

Set/Class Theory Numeric Temporal Mereotopology

Graph Measure Processes Objects

Qualities

SUMO Sources• PSL• Enterprise Ontology• ITBM-CNR ontologies

– Unrestricted-Time– Representation– Anatomy– Biologic-Functions– Biologic-Substances– topics– meronymy– topology– topo-morphology– localization– assessment– structuring-concepts– physical-concepts– top-level– social-objects– Quantities– Actors– Positions– Natural-Kinds

• Ontolingua ontologies– component-assemblies -

Gruber and Olsen– product-ontology - Fikes– physical-quantities - Brauch– scalar-quantities - Gruber

and Olsen– unary-scalar-functions -

Gruber and Olsen– abstract-algebra authored -

Genesereth, Gruber and Olsen

– kif-extensions– kif-relations– kif-sets– frame-ontology - Mribiere– okbc-ontology - Xpetard– Standard Dimensions - U

Madrid, Spain– Simple-Time - Mribiere – Standard-Units - Loeser +

Pinto– Agents - Arnaoudova– KIF-Numbers

• Allen - temporal ontology

• Pease - Core Plan Representation

• Borgo, Guarino, and Masolo's - Formal Theory of Physical Objects

• Casati and Varzi - Theory of Holes

• Level – verb taxonomy

• Russell and Norvig - upper ontology

• Smith - Formal Theory of Fiat/Bona Fide Boundaries/Objects

• Sowa - upper ontology

• Whitten - Starter KB

Domain Specific Ontologies

• Finance and investment• Real Estate• Terrain features• Computers and Networks (Quality of Service)• Periodic table of elements• North American Industrial Coding System• ECommerce services• Terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction• Air force planning and operations• Army planning• Ontologies developed outside Teknowledge

– Biological viruses– Intellectual property– Linguistic elements

System Overview

Formal Ontology

Theorem Prover

Simple Workflow

Language Interface

GUI

Simple Language Example

• "The dog bites the man" • Shows both simple noun mappings

and a simple verb mapping

(exists (?D ?M ?E)

(and

(instance ?E Biting)

(instance ?D Canine)

(instance ?M MalePerson)

(agent ?E ?D)

(patient ?E ?M)))

There exists a biting event, a canine and a male person such that the canine is the agentof the biting and the male person is thepatient of the biting.

d,m,e : Biting(e) Canine(d) MalePerson(m) agent(e,d) patient (e,m)

System Overview

Formal Ontology

Theorem Prover

Simple Workflow

Language Interface

GUI

Simple Language Generation

• Term translation• Relation templates

– Use C-like printf statements

• Result is awkward but usually grammatical

• Preserves deep meaning• English (Sevcenko), German (Wulf),

Czech (Sevcenko), Italian (Ulivieri & Molino)– Hindi, Telugu, Tagalog, Chinese, Russian in

progress

Plans

• Problem resolution heuristics - Knowing which statement to retract– Metrics for statement use– Statement assertion recency– User weighting

• Proof summarization– Tree-based visibility selection, hide

transformations with one premise• Hardening

– Improved control panel– Testing– Installation packaging

Plans

• Scaleup– How to handle 10 users, 100 users

•Coordination techniques change•Refine the agenda•Avoid deadlock

– Hierarchical conflict detection• Misc

– Better voting tabulation– Pluggable voting policy– Inference-based relevance searching