The IEEE Standard Upper Ontology (IEEE, 2001) is an effort to create a large, general-purpose, formalontology. The ontology will be an open standard that can be reused for both academic and commercialpurposes without fee, and it will be designed to support additional domain-specific ontologies. Theeffort is targeted for use in automated inference, semantic interoperability between heterogeneousinformation systems and natural language processing applications. The effort was begun in May 2000with an e-mail discussion list, and since then there have been over 6000 e-mail messages among 170subscribers. These subscribers include representatives from government, academia and industry invarious countries. The effort was officially approved as an IEEE standards project in December 2000.Recently a successful workshop was held at IJCAI 2001 to discuss progress and proposals for thisproject (IJCAI, 2001).