The IEEE Standard Upper Ontology (IEEE, 2001) is an effort to create a large, general-purpose, formal
ontology. The ontology will be an open standard that can be reused for both academic and commercial
purposes without fee, and it will be designed to support additional domain-specific ontologies. The
effort is targeted for use in automated inference, semantic interoperability between heterogeneous
information systems and natural language processing applications. The effort was begun in May 2000
with an e-mail discussion list, and since then there have been over 6000 e-mail messages among 170
subscribers. These subscribers include representatives from government, academia and industry in
various countries. The effort was officially approved as an IEEE standards project in December 2000.
Recently a successful workshop was held at IJCAI 2001 to discuss progress and proposals for this
project (IJCAI, 2001).
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