> One small, but significant, dislike of the bio-ontology community > for SUMO (as used by Solditova and King) is that it isn't really > only an upper level. It strays into, for instance, stating a > protein is a foodstuff. this, as you might suppose, causes > biologists to laugh.
That is very true, and I think that the importance of having huge top-level ontologies like SUMO or maybe Cyc is largely overrated. On the other hand, having very small and basic foundational ontologies (e.g. the most basic ontologies of the DOLCE lite ontology, BFO or SKOS) is more important than most developers of ontologies seem to think. It is a great aid to the development of interoperable ontologies to have a common, basic framework of classes (e.g. physical-object, perdurant, quality) and properties (e.g. part-of, participant-in). These basic ontologies do not need to be large or complicated to be useful (around 20 classes and properties are sufficient, I guess). Quite to the contrary, making these foundational ontologies too complicated would significantly decrease their usefulness. //Matthias Samwald
