The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology SUMO at Age 7: Progress and Promise

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The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) at Age
7 Progress and Promise
Presented at Ontolog 6 September 2007
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Overview

• SUMO is a large, open source, formal ontology
  stated in first-order logic
• Mapped to a large multi-lingual lexicon
• With open source tools for ontology development
  and application

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Terms and Concepts
Concept
Orange
Referent
Slide adpated from (c) Key-Sun Choi for Pan
Localization 2005
from the slide of Bargmeyer, Bruce, Open
Metadata Forum, Berlin, 2005
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Imagine...your view of the web
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...and the Computer's View
Thanks to Frank van Harmelen for the original
idea of this slide and Peter Yim for the Chinese
language content
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But wait, we've got Taxonomies -
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Wait, we've got semantics -
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Semantics Helps a Machine Appear Smart

• A smart machine should be able to make the same
  inferences we do
• (let's not debate the AI philosophy about whether
  it would actually be smart)?

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Definitions

• An ontology is a shared conceptualization of a
  domain
• An ontology is a set of definitions in a formal
  language for terms describing the world

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Upper Ontology

• An attempt to capture the most general and
  reusable terms and definitions
• Provokes thought on clarifying the meaning of
  more specific terms
• Provides for large-scale reuse

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Ontology vs Language and Knowledge
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Suggested Upper Merged Ontology

• 1000 terms, 4000 axioms, 750 rules
• Mapped by hand to all of WordNet 1.6
• then ported to 3.0
• Development begun in 2000
• US Government small business grant
• Associated domain ontologies totalling 20,000
  terms and 70,000 axioms
• Free
• SUMO is owned by IEEE but basically public domain
• Domain ontologies are released under GNU
• www.ontologyportal.org

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SUMO (continued)?

• Formally defined, not dependent on a particular
  implementation
• Open source toolset for browsing and inference
• http//sigmakee.sourceforge.net
• Many uses of SUMO (independent of the SUMO
  authors and funders)?
• http//www.ontologyportal.org/Pubs.html

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SUMO Validation

• Mapping to all of WordNet lexicon
• A check on coverage and completeness (at a given
  level of generality)?
• Peer review
• Open source since its inception
• Formal validation with a theorem prover
• Free of contradictions (within a generous time
  bound for search)?
• Application to dozens of domain ontologies

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Internationalization

• Translation of SUMO paraphrases to diverse
  multiple languages
• Some confidence theres no cultural or linguistic
  bias
• Chinese, Hindi, Tagalog, Czech, German, Italian,
  Korean, Romanian, Arabic
• Estonian and Hungarian in development
• SUMO is linked to multiple very large lexicons
  (Euro WordNet, Balkanet, HowNet etc)?
• English, Chinese, Italian, Arabic

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SUMO Structure
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Are SUMO Terms Directly Usable?

• Yes.
• Study 1/3 of upper ontology terms directly
  appear in answers on large test
• Cohen, P., Chaudhri, V., Pease A., and Schrag, R.
  (1999), Does Prior Knowledge Facilitate the
  Development of Knowledge Based Systems, In
  Proceedings of the Sixteenth National Conference
  on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-1999). Menlo
  Park, Calif. AAAI Press. http//home.earthlink.ne
  t/adampease/professional/cohen-aaai99.ps
• before (in time), agent (of a process), etc.

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Case Roles

• Roles that entities play in a Process
• agent, patient, instrument etc.

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Case Roles

• Brutus stabbed Caesar with a knife on Tuesday.

Caesar
patient
agent
instrument
A Stabbing
A Knife
Brutus
time
A Tuesday
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Case Roles

• Brutus stabbed Caesar with a knife on Tuesday.

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Example Rules
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Commercial Application

• One year project for Articulate Software
• Working with a company that creates financial
  transaction systems for royalty payments
• Re-engineer current ontology management business
  process, tools and ontology

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Commercial Application

• Extensive current ontology
• Captured in spreadsheets
• Local term names and definitions for every
  customer
• An essential part of their process
• Ontology management system that exports XML RDF
• One end-user database is nearly 3GB
• Ontology functions can be batch-process

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Project Goals

• To add formality to existing model
• To support full logical inference, consistency
  checks
• Give customers user-friendly ontology editor
• so that they can maintain the ontology
• Create broader set of definitions
• Enable greater DB integration
• Enable expansion into new markets
• Leverage work
• Exercise SUMO and Sigma in business

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TPTP

• Research effort in automated theorem proving
• 40 different first order logic provers
• Annual competition
• Thousands of test problems
• We will issue SUMO-based tests in TPTP format
  next month
• Sigma connected to TPTP prover suite

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Controlled English to Logic Translation

• Automated translation from English to Logic
• Uses WordNet-SUMO mappings for 100,000 word sense
  vocabulary
• Domain-independent
• Development process
• Start with a highly restricted language and
  gradually add linguistic features