NIST has developed Sumo2loom software, that has been transferred and made publicly available at Teknowledge Corporation and announced to the Loom user community. This NIST transfer drew the attention of several respected researchers, including Loom maintainer Thomas Russ, (who wrote, "Wow, this is great!"). SUMO (Suggested Upper Merged Ontology) is an ontology being created as part of the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology Working Group. The goal of this Working Group is to develop a standard upper ontology that will promote data interoperability, information search and retrieval, automated inferencing, and natural language processing.

Loom is a knowledge representation language developed by researchers in the Artificial Intelligence research group at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. NIST's translating program, SUMO2LOOM, was developed to translate SUMO into a form that can be used by the LOOM-V4 inference engine. Loom has been distributed to more than 80 universities and corporations, and is being used in numerous DARPA-sponsored projects in planning, software engineering, and intelligent integration of information. Having a program that will translate the IEEE SUMO to LOOM will reach a large LOOM-user community, enhance the adoption of SUMO, an improve interoperability among users.

Interested users can seek further information from the description and documentation on Sumo2loom.

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Date Created: July 10, 2003
Last Modified: July 29, 2005