MICRA Inc.

Home page


MICRA, Inc. is a small corporation in New Jersey currently focused on developing a "Foundation Ontology" (FO) to support Semantic Interoperability and "Natural Language Understanding" (NLU). Prior efforts were the preparation of linguistic resources for NLU, The President is Patrick J. Cassidy.

The offices are located at:

735 Belvidere Ave.
Plainfield, NJ 07062-2054
Tel: (908)561-3416
e-mail: cassidy@micra.com

Current Efforts: MICRA is hosting the COSMO (COmmon Semantic MOdel) ontology, a public, open foundation ontology that is intended to include all the basic elements ("primitive concept") required to specify the meanings of any more specific concept in any domain. The current version COSMO.owl is in the OWL format, and contains representations of over 26000 owl classes (types), over 1360 owl ObjectProperties (semantic relations), and over 23000 restrictions. Additional files relating to the COSMO ontology are available in its parent folder COSMO. The work is continuing, and all comments are welcome.

The COSMO ontology is an ongoing project being developed as a resource to support Semantic Interoperability and Natural Language understanding (NLU). The current status, outline, and description of the COSMO are summarized in:

A Power Point summary
A short outline
A Detailed description



Previous Efforts:
MICRA prepared the electronic version of the 1911 Roget's Thesaurus that is widely available on the internet. That version was typed in manually in 1988 and now has been superseded by a scanned version prepared elsewhere Project Gutenberg Roget's Thesaurus. MICRA also prepared an electronic version of the 1913 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary which is available as a public domain file for download from the Project Gutenberg web site. Smaller portions of that dictionary can be found at Project Gutenberg Webster

.

The text is marked with special tags and special-character symbols; files explaining the tags and symbols are available here:

The tag definitions
The special-character symbols

A version of the 1913 Webster (the "GNU Collaborative Dictionary of English" or GCIDE) that has been partially supplemented with newer words and word senses (mostly from the WordNet dictionary) is also available, at the GNU website. That version can be serched online using a utility created by Sergey Poznyakoff. The details are available here:

GCIDE online

That supplemented version of the 1913 Webster, maintained at the GNU ftp site, is intended to serve as a general dictionary of the English language, freely available for download. It will contain all definitions that are submitted by individuals with expertise in the relevant fields. The project to maintain the dictionary is strictly a volunteer effort, not funded from any external source, and contributions of time and data are requested from anyone willing to help in this endeavor. Anyone wishing to assist in improving the dictionary should contact Pat Cassidy or Sergey Poznyakoff (see the 'GCIDE online' website above).