COSMO Ontology

"The goal of the COSMO working group was to develop a foundation ontology by a collaborative process that will allow it to represent all of the basic (‘primitive’) ontology elements that all members felt were needed for their applications. Interoperability could then be achieved among ontology-based applications using the foundation ontology by creating any specialized domain ontology element as a combination of the primitive ontology elements, and when one system wishes to communicate information to others, it must transmit not only the data, but also any logical specifications of the ontology elements required to interpret the data (if they are not already in the foundation ontology or some public extension). Any system that can properly interpret the primitive elements will be able to properly interpret ontology elements created as a combination of those primitives.

The development of COSMO is fully open, and any comments or suggestions from any sources are welcome. After some discussion and input from members in 2006, the development of the COSMO has been continued primarily by Patrick Cassidy, the chairman of the COSMO Working Group (no longer active). Contributions and suggestions from any interested party are still welcome and encouraged. Many of the types (OWL classes) in the current COSMO have been taken from the OpenCyc OWL version 0.78, and from the SUMO. Other elements were taken from other ontologies (such as BFO and DOLCE) or developed specifically for COSMO.

The development of the COSMO started as a merger of basic elements from Cyc, SUMO, and DOLCE, and continued up to revision 589 (2008-02-19), at which point the names (labels) of the elements of the COSMO were compared with the words in the Longman defining vocabulary, and out of the 2201 Longman words, it was discovered that 1817 were not present as labels for COSMO elements. At this point, a systematic supplementation of the COSMO was begun, to assure that the concepts represented by the Longman vocabulary were all represented in some form in the COSMO. The new elements are being added by alphabetical inspection of the list of missing Longman words.

At version 0.65 (April 2010) the COSMO had 7339 types (OWL classes), 808 relations, and 2039 restrictions, and all of the words in the Longman defining vocabulary had some correlated ontology element in the COSMO. The formal mapping of the Longman words to the ontology elements is at present (rev945) only partly complete, and is continuing. The mapping consists of a relation “xxxx” on the ontology element to the Longman word(s) that represent that element in English."