sumo

SUMO is a term that can refer to more than one concept. It commonly denotes the traditional Japanese sport of sumo wrestling, and it also stands for the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology, an upper ontology used in knowledge representation and artificial intelligence. The two uses are unrelated and appear in different contexts, one cultural and athletic, the other technical and academic.

In the sport of sumo, two rikishi (wrestlers) compete in a circular clay and sand ring called a dohyō. The objective is to force the opponent out of the ring or to make any part of the opponent’s body other than the soles of the feet touch the ground. Matches are brief, often lasting only a few seconds. The sport features elaborate rituals, including salt throwing for purification and the yobidashi ring announcers. The dohyō is about 4.55 meters in diameter, and top-level competition is organized into six annual honbasho (official tournaments) with divisions such as Makuuchi and Juryo. Wrestlers reside in training stables, or heya, and pursue ranks led by the yokozuna, the sport’s highest title.

The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) is a formal framework for knowledge representation. It provides definitions of general concepts (such as objects, processes, attributes, and relations) intended to serve as a shared foundation for AI systems and semantic technologies. SUMO is designed to be language- and domain-agnostic, enabling mappings from natural language resources and various lexical databases to a common ontology. It is used to support interoperability, reasoning, and integration across disparate datasets, and it has been linked to other resources and standard vocabularies to improve machine understanding of everyday concepts.