SUMO (Suggested Upper Merged Ontology)


SUMO (Suggested Upper Merged Ontology) was developed within the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology Working Group. The goal of this Working Group is to develop a standard ontology that will promote data interoperability, information search and retrieval, automated inferencing, and natural language processing. An ontology is similar to a dictionary or glossary, but with greater detail and structure that enables computers to process its content. An ontology consists of a set of concepts, axioms, and relationships that describe a domain of interest. An upper ontology is limited to concepts that are meta, generic, abstract and philosophical, and therefore are general enough to address (at a high level) a broad range of domain areas. Concepts specific to given domains will not be included; however, this standard will provide a structure and a set of general concepts upon which domain ontologies (e.g. medical, financial, engineering, etc.) could be constructed.

SUMO is an official 'starter document' in the IEEE SUO working group.

See also: The SUMO main page and the browser which was designed for this ontology.

Disclaimer: This transcription of SUMO 1.55 to Protégé is incomplete, but may be useful to visualize the classes and their relations. All classes are present, and almost all relations and functions (both represented as slots). No axioms are included, and some predicates have not been ported. Work is continuing toward a more complete port of SUMO to Protégé.

Contact: Adam Pease

Download the SUMO ontology in Protégé.