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Re: [ontolog-forum] Semantic Web shortcomings [was Re: ANN: GoodRelation

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From: "Александр Шкотин" <alex.shkotin@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:23:36 +0400
Message-id: <b24945a10808130723o52d9fd87ge785800cce36622d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Ron,

I have nothing against software, but the point is:
- today we have databases but may be 5 years later we'll have knowledge bases (formal ontologies) instead.

Alex

PS we have now project to transform geochemistry DB to ontology - very subtle work, I must admit;)


2008/8/13 Ron Wheeler <rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Software Engineering is required if you actually want anything functional.
Otherwise all you get is words which is what we mostly have now.


Ron

Александр Шкотин wrote:
> Dear Max,
>
> thank you for very interesting article,
> but IMHO SemWeb is not about software engineering. It is about
> knowledge engineering.
> So it is not for programmers at all.
> And roughly say - it's forbidden for programmer to create ontology, as
> we just get another piece of code;)
> that what we really have now in many cases:)
>
> Best regards,
>
> Alex
>
>
>
> 2008/8/13 Michael Maximilien <mmaximilien@xxxxxxxxx
> <mailto:mmaximilien@xxxxxxxxx>>
>
>     Dear John et al.,
>
>     As a long time passive casual reader of this list and having even
>     participated in some ONTOLOG sessions in the past (circa 2005), I
>     first want to say that I always appreciate your posts.  They are
>     always clear and full of wisdom.
>
>     I found this one to be particular thoughtful, pragmatic, and to the
>     point.  Like you, I too am also of the opinion that the Semantic Web
>     community has made a series of mistakes at the architecture, design,
>     and implementation as well as business level, which are likely to
>     prevent it (and associated technologies) from ever going mainstream on
>     the Web.
>
>     As a new researcher and observer of what goes on related to the Web in
>     Silicon Valley, I was quickly brought down to earth in 2004 when I
>     tried to sell and show early efforts and research in Semantic Web.
>
>     Upon a deeper (though casual) analysis of the reality in the valley
>     and going back to my software engineering roots, I came to the
>     realization, like you, that Semantic Web technologies and artifacts
>     are simply not meshing well with Web technologies.  However, unlike
>     your excellent DB-focused analysis, mine was around Software
>     Engineering and in particular the lack of agility in Semantic Web
>     tools and technologies.
>
>     Web developers want quick and malleable results that they can quickly
>     show to their stakeholders.  The reason is simply that with the
>     Internet, software cycles are shorter and shorter.  To stay in
>     business, companies and developers must show completely working
>     systems soon, otherwise clients move on.  Agility is paramount.
>     Frameworks like Ruby on Rails, PHP/Zend, and Python/Django have gained
>     wide acceptance and popularity in recent months (past 36 months or so)
>     primarily due to their uncanny ability to get you up and running on
>     the Web in a matter of hours, not days.  You simply need an idea, a
>     relational database, and a server, and a few hours of programming.
>
>     Indeed many of the mushrooming Facebook applications and other hot Web
>     2.0 and 2.x applications are now done in these frameworks over
>     weekends here in the valley...  With cloud computing, the database and
>     the servers requirements are themselves becoming commodities that you
>     can pay for by the hour---only increasing the pressures to have quick
>     and agile development.
>
>     Semantic Web, and various aspects of initial versions of Web services
>     for that matter, required heavy tooling or 'big up front designs"
>     which are antithesis to the core virtues of the Web.  That with the
>     fact that they mostly ignored the staying power and value of the
>     relational data model, made them unknown and heavy to developers.  The
>     return on such huge up front investment to use Semantic Web tools is
>     simply too big to justify the minimal returns...
>
>     Additionally, in my opinion, the Achilles heels of the Semantic Web
>     was maybe the fact the designers seemingly ignored one of the reasons
>     of the Web's success.  The simple fact fact that with minimal
>     protocols (HTTP and few others) and few up front agreements (HTML and
>     others) the Web allowed anyone, anywhere to publish and create
>     applications...  Yes that leads to a plethora of duplicated data and
>     semantics, but that's fine as, in the end, it also follows how humans
>     naturally do things.
>
>     Human civilizations has seen various repeated technologies and tools
>     over centuries.  The Chinese initially invented many technologies that
>     the west re-invented later on...  and now, vice a versa.  Why would a
>     wold-wide web be any different?  If as humans we liked having one
>     meaning and representation for domains, we would all speak English,
>     Spanish, or Chinese.  We don't and in many way this is a great thing
>     with lots of benefits, while also creating various drawbacks.
>
>     Now, this is not to say that the Web is perfect and that efforts to
>     add semantics or making the Web more secure are not needed.  It simply
>     is a reminder that any mainstream changes on the Web needs to mesh
>     with the core values and design choices that have made the Web a
>     success.  It's no wonder that REST has surpassed SOAP/WSDL for making
>     the Web programmable.  REST meshes perfectly with the Web's
>     architecture; SOAP in many ways, simply does not...
>
>     Ajith Ranabahu (PhD student at Wright State University) and I have a
>     short paper that summarizes some of this thinking that we presented
>     last year at ICSC (http://icsc2007.eecs.uci.edu/).  You can find a PDF
>     here for your perusal:
>     http://maximilien.org/publications/papers/2007/Maximilien+Ranabahu07a.pdf
>
>     All in all, I think it's great that every now and then we are able to
>     be pragmatic about things and realize our mistakes.  I believe that
>     this shows strength, confidence, and maturity.  I believe many aspects
>     and promises from Semantic Web technologies need a bit of that
>     pragmatic reminder...
>
>     Sincerely yours,
>
>     E. Michael Maximilien (aka "max")
>     http://maximilien.org
>     http://blog.maximilien.org
>     IBM Research
>     San Jose, CA USA
>
>     On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 7:01 AM, John F. Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx
>     <mailto:sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>     > Martin,
>     >
>     > Thanks for the pointers to your papers.  I agree with a lot of what
>     > you say, but my major concern is that there is much, much more
>     to say
>     > that goes far beyond what the Semantic Web is currently doing.
>      A lot
>     > of useful work has been done within the SemWeb paradigm, but my
>     major
>     > complaint is that it's too provincial.  The foundation was
>     established
>     > without considering the immense amount of mission-critical
>     technology
>     > that was already available and very widely used.
>     >
>     > Relational databases are the most obvious technology that was
>     omitted.
>     > The world economy runs on RDBs, and nearly every major
>     commercial web
>     > site is integrated with an RDB.  For smaller sites, the standard is
>     > LAMP:  Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl, Python, or PHP.
>     >
>     > When RDF(S) was being designed, the obvious approach was to support
>     > arbitrary n-tuples.  That would have made it trivial to download or
>     > upload any or all of an SQL database (or the response from an SQL
>     > query) to or from RDF n-tuples.  Some people who had a bright idea
>     > for implementing "triple stores" thought that they could implement
>     > triples faster than n-tuples.  But that is not only false, it
>     > would be hopelessly nearsighted as a design decision, even if it
>     > had a grain of truth.
>     >
>     > Another weakness is that the designers ignored the major lesson
>     > of DB design from the earliest, pre-relational days:  a DB without
>     > indexing is hopelessly inefficient.  Embedding data in web pages
>     > is useful for many purposes, but high-speed processing of large
>     > volumes of data requires downloading and indexing. (Note Google.)
>     >
>     > Another limitation is caused by ignoring existing standards.
>     > There is an ISO standard for Prolog, but people are still working
>     > on an incredibly underpowered version called RuleML.  Many major
>     > sites routinely download RDF and OWL into Prolog in order to get
>     > any kind of reasonable performance.  At our company (VivoMind),
>     > we download and translate RDF and OWL into Prolog faster than
>     > most native processors can do just the download.  Then the
>     > Prolog version runs circles around the native systems.
>     >
>     > Prolog is the major language used for immensely large systems
>     > that do complex inferences.  As just one example, Experian
>     > (one of the three major credit bureaus that check everybody's
>     > credit worthiness) uses Prolog for all their complex checks.
>     > In fact, they use it so much that they bought the Prologia
>     > company, which was founded by Alain Colmerauer, the person
>     > who first designed and implemented Prolog.
>     >
>     > There is much more to say, but it's essential for the SemWebbers
>     > to recognize that there is an enormous amount of very important
>     > theory and technology that must be integrated with the Sem Web
>     > before it can reach the high hopes that people had for it.  And
>     > integration does *not* mean a one-sided mapping of everything
>     > outside the Sem Web into XML-based notations.
>     >
>     > And by the way, I'm pleased that you liked my paper "Fads and
>     > Fallacies about Logic."  Jim Hendler was the editor of the
>     > journal in which it was published, and Jim liked the paper
>     > -- despite the fact that he and I have had many arguments
>     > over the years about many things (although we occasionally
>     > agree about a few).
>     >
>     > John
>     >
>     >
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>
>     --
>     max
>     http://maximilien.org
>     http://blog.maximilien.com
>
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