What not to expect from the Mikrokosmos Ontology!!

The Mikrokosmos ontology was developed with small-scale resources: less than 2 person years of effort. Moreover, it has always been intended to be a practical, situated ontology meant primarily for serving the needs of natural language semantics and machine translation.

In this ontology, you should not expect to find

  • any kind of guarantees, warrantees, or liability for correctness or precision.
  • The unique, right, or correct ontology of the world.
  • the ontology that you or I may have in our heads.
  • formally clean or theoretically "pure" concepts; in particular, you will not find formal definitions of concepts or their necessary and sufficient conditions.
  • complete consistency; guaranteed absence of contraditions; etc.
  • complete coverage of the world; there are lots and lots of gaps, I am sure.
  • the terminology of brain surgery, East African Cuisine, or 10th century theology....
  • This does not mean that we do not care about any of the above. Your comments and suggestions are most welcome. Please write to Kavi Mahesh.

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