Origins of The IEEE Standard Upper Ontology

Research and applications in computer science are creating the need for precise definitions of the concepts that make up our world. Web searching is handicapped by the limitations of specifying search criteria in terms of keywords rather than concepts. Automated natural language understanding, both oral and written, is severely limited by the ambiguity of language. Software engineering is limited by the need for engineers to define concepts to model the world. Computers exist in a world similar to Europe in the Middle Ages in which tiny principalities each had their own language or dialect. Worse yet, these dialects are impoverished and they enable the computers to say only very specific and limited things. In order to enable continued progress in ecommerce and software integration, we must give computers a common language with a richness that more closely approaches that of human language. Integrating the meaning (or semantics) of databases and programs is crucial for creating software that is reliable and scalable. The use of ontologies to specify semantics is emerging as a promising technique for software integration. Creators of different components often assume they understand the terms in the same way. The reality is that is rarely the case. Even the bestdocumented code has implicit assumptions and ambiguity in the definition and usage of terms. Research in several areas including computer science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, library science and linguistics are helping to meet these needs. All these fields have experience with creating precise and standard descriptions and terminology for the things that make up our world. (Sowa 2000) Current research is hampered by several issues. Computer scientists and philosophers lack consensus in their communities for creating the very large, wide-coverage ontologies that are needed, although they have the necessary formal languages to do so. Librarians and linguists have the charter to create large ontologies but those ontologies have typically lacked the formal definitions needed for reasoning and decisionmaking. In fact, it is probably fair to claim that to date no group has taken full advantage of the vast body of historical work in this area One group that has developed a large formal ontology is Cycorp. However, ithas released only a small part to the public, retains proprietary rights to the vast bulk of their ontology, . (Lenat 1995) and the contents of the ontology have not been subject to extensive peer review In this paper we discuss the origins of the Standard Upper ontology effort (SUO, 2001), the strategy used in created the current working draft of the merged ontology, , and the current state of the ontology .