1. The U.S. Army Communications Electronics Command
Common Upper Ontology for
Cross-Domain Semantic Interoperability
The U.S. Army
Communications
Electronics
Command
James Schoening
(732)
19 May 2004
CECOM Bottom Line: THE WARFIGHTER

2. Question #1: Would a ‘good enough’ common upper ontology provide benefits? (Assuming feasibility)
Yes responses:
Obrst: “ANY upper ontology is better than none.”(1)
Cassidy: “Yes, it is desirable and feasible to develop a common upper ontology within a large organization.”
No responses: None
(1) Leo Obrst: “I usually say that ANY upper ontology is better than none. But of
course, I mean any reasonably good one. An abomination would not be
useful, but luckily there aren't any of those.”

3. Question #2: Can we achieve cross-domain semantic interoperability without a common ontology?
No responses:
Cassidy (IEEE): “there is no other way to communicate conceptual information between computers that can begin to approximate the efficiency of an upper ontology.”
West (IEEE): “Either they both need to be mapped to (or use) a common ontology, or you need to do a one to one mapping “
Obrst: “Ultimately, no, you cannot.”(1)
Yes responses:
Polikoff: “I understand Tim Berners-Lee believes semantic interoperability can be achieved without a common upper ontology.”
(1) Leo Obrst: “Ultimately, no, you cannot. You can limp along for some time without
either an upper ontology or even a reference ontology for your specific
domain (i.e., the latter would enable you to map two domain ontologies
that are about roughly the same domain) with implicit compacts (nodding
our heads that yes, this is what we mean and we agree to this), but it
will hurt, and eventually you're going have to get your feet looked at,
and the ailment remedied. We don't want to generate a new generation of
"conceptual/semantic" stovepipes, but that is a real possibility.”
(2) Irene Polikoff: My understanding of Tim Berners-Lee position is that he believes that
semantic interoperability can be achieved without a common upper
ontology. In fact, this point is an essential part of his vision of the
semantic web. The subway map picture
( is one
example of Tim's explaining how it would work and why the semantic web
does not require such ontology.

4. Question #3 (New): Is a common upper ontology feasible?
Yes responses:
Cassidy:”standard upper ontology is perfectly feasible”
No Responses:
SOWA: “too brittle to accommodate all the variations and modifications that inevitably arise.”
SOWA: Cyc, which has spent 20 years developing a tightly-organized ontology from top to bottom without achieving a single money-making application,
SOWA: “not going to get there by a brute-force legislation of one universal ontology.
My Response: Many known and unknown challenges. We won’t know until we try. May be hard, very heard. But DoD must try.

5. Question #4 (New): What are the tasks and challenges
Question #4 (New): What are the tasks and challenges? (If a common upper ontology is selected by Army, DoD, Fed)
Improving selected upper ontology?
Developing domain ontologies?
Finding qualified employees/contractors?
Mapping legacy systems?
Conformance standards and testing?

6. Army Common Upper Ontology Evaluation Team
Awaiting approval of Army CIO/G-6 charter to:
Explore benefits/feasibility  
Evaluate candidates
Identify technical challenges and way ahead
Report out by 30 July 2004
Initial organizations represented:
CECOM; TRADOC; FCS; ARL; CERDEC-C2D; CERDEC-I2W
Will expand membership as much as we can
me at if you’d like to join.
Partially evaluating in open with IEEE at