John F. Sowa

Taxonomy is a Greek word which means an arrangement based on any kind of law or principle.

— John F. Sowa

The word ontology comes from the Greek ontos for being and logos for word. It is a relatively new term in the long history of philosophy, introduced by the 19th century German philosophers to distinguish the study of being as such from the study of various kinds of beings in the natural sciences. The traditional term for the types of beings is Aristotle's word category, which he used for classifying anything that can be said or predicated about anything.

— John F. Sowa

Soon, the enterprise of the information age will find itself immobilized if it does not have the ability to tap the information resources within and without its boundaries.

— John F. Sowa

A conceptual graph is a finite connected bipartite graph which consists of concepts and conceptual relations. Every conceptual relation has one or more arcs, each of which is linked to a concept. We define a multilevel conceptual graph to be a conceptual graph in which some of the concepts and conceptual relations arc sensitive.

— John F. Sowa

We define a semantic network as "the collection of all the relationships that concepts have to other concepts, to percepts, to procedures, and to motor mechanisms" of the knowledge".

— John F. Sowa

To distinguish the meaningful graphs that represent real or possible situations in the external world, certain graphs are declared to be canonical.

— John F. Sowa

An analysis of the concept of mind is an important philosophical issue, but the analysis cannot be reduced to programming of physiological terms... [It remarks the importance of the question] the way people think and the way computers can simulate thinking.

— John F. Sowa

[The goal of the LOT (lattice of theories) is to create a framework] which can support an open-ended number of theories (potentially infinite) organized in a lattice together with systematic metalevel techniques for moving from one to another, for testing their adequacy for any given problem, and for mixing, matching, combining, and transforming them to whatever form is appropriate for whatever problem anyone is trying to solve.

— John F. Sowa