Alex, please pardon me for replying on-list to your off-list response,
but I see these points as of general interest. My replies and
comments are in-line below.
Many thanks,
Christopher (01)
----- Original Message -----
From: <alex.shkotin@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "Christopher Spottiswoode" <cms@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2008 6:01 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Semantic Web shortcomings [was Re:
ANN:GoodRelations - The Web Ontology for E-Commerce] (02)
> Hi Christopher,
> I am not so familiar with English to read a lot at forum. (03)
>From your reference below to the "AOS", you are evidently a
speed-reader in English, to have sifted that key acronym so quickly
out from my torrents of words now in the archive! (04)
> May be you have a short article with your ideas systematically
> stated? (05)
Not yet, I'm afraid. Maybe one will condense out in due course. But
of course you are not the first to seek that one-pager, and experience
has shown me that at that level of brevity there can in this case only
be high abstractions which don't mean much to anyone at this stage.
Too much is very different from what everyone is used to! Hence all
my kite-flying to test where I get that meaningful lift. And relevant
resonances _are_ building up and gathering together, I believe. (06)
Of course a running AOS will be the best proof of the pudding, but my
problem is that I am looking for help in getting to that stage! I
believe that the whole design has settled sufficiently for that
marvellous team effect to be feasible already. I just have to locate
the other appropriate member(s) of the team. (07)
But does all that not mean that there is a fatal accessibility or
propagandistic problem in the whole project? A rather basic marketing
problem, in other words? No, because that AOS itself, as an
"Application Operating System", will be the very best medium for
overcoming that problem, "helping people simplify complexity
together." It was even designed with that very generic yet objective
need in mind. (Here's a bit of background I already mentioned on the
web long ago: "Philosophy and Education" was the title of a
well-attended 10-lecture evening course I gave over 30 years ago at
the University of Cape Town's Extra-Mural Studies Department, based on
the very same epistemology and related perspectives which underlie my
present work. And they themselves were largely defined 10 years
previously, even before I had had any professional involvement in
information systems. (So one might reasonably expect at least an
unusual evolutionary path to my whole thesis.)) (08)
> You may number them as Leibniz and Wittgenstein did. (09)
Luckily I don't have to aspire to such levels, as Peter's admirable
cim3 system already adds those useful purple-numbers to each
paragraph! My previous message to you had even used them. (See the
"#nid<nnn>" html anchor reference in the url to my 4th instalment.
But you must post in text format, with a blank line between each pair
of paragraphs.) (010)
> But anyway let me tell you one simple criteria of real ontology
> management
> system:
> it should be reasoner (like FaCT, Racer...) inside, otherwise an
> ontology is
> just a structured text. (011)
Yes, ok, hence the reference in your original post (copied in my reply
to it, below) to knowledge engineering. But that is not enough, so my
question to you related to software engineering, which is where those
programmers enter the picture while you would keep them away from
ontologies, and for very relevant reasons too. (012)
You see, for me the Semantic Web should be about software engineering,
and the W3C's famous "layer cake" (Google that for any number of
versions of it!) certainly seems to present a long-hoped-for outcome
of a major software engineering effort, or two, or many, and to want
to provide for indefinitely more such efforts by developers
everywhere. Interestingly, I had already in 1996 written on the web
that my design involved a "semantic web", and that was before any use
of the term by the W3C on the web, as far as I have been able to see
yet. But to prevent confusion I have dropped the label for my work,
in favour of "Democratic Web". (013)
However, as you will see, starting in my forthcoming 5th instalment,
there are first some not-so-minor matters such as modularity and
scalability to address. That will be with, I believe, the right kind
of outcome. In some later instalment I will indicate some of the
enormous relevance of all that software engineering to your knowledge
engineering projects. There will be a great complementarity there,
ontology-based too. (014)
>
> For example we have in mind to use Owlgres in our project.
>
> Anyway, good luck with AOS,
>
> Alex (015)
Thanks, don't worry if all my abstractions don't mean much yet, and
bye for now,
Christopher (016)
>
> 2008/8/13 Christopher Spottiswoode <cms@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
>> Alex, and Max and John too, with later Ron Wheeler as well:
>>
>> Alex, you had written (also in response to John S):
>>
>> > 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:)
>>
>> That is a very sharp comment. Most apt...
>>
>> So what needs to be added to ontologies so that they can be
>> relevant to software engineering, yet without bastardizing that
>> essence you so rightly insist on? Is any such supplementing or
>> complementing even possible, from your perhaps-too-purist point of
>> view?
>>
>> My own answers (as usual not so humble) are "Yes, and it's
>> realworld semantics"! Or "semantics + pragmatics", if you wish.
>>
>> That, with my expansion below, is also my answer to Ron Wheeler's
>> later follow-up to you:
>>
>> > Software Engineering is required if you actually want anything
>> > functional. Otherwise all you get is words which is what we
>> > mostly have now.
>>
>> But obviously those realworld semantics must be totally consistent
>> with and framed by the syntactic form, and formal or internal
>> semantics, of the ontologies themselves. (Though, please, I am
>> not trying to be mathematically formal or fully accurate with such
>> concepts as they might already be in use in some formal sense --
>> just bear with me here...)
>>
>> Now as it happens (of course...), that consistency requirement is
>> a good part of the restrictions on the "relationship methods" in
>> MACK (The Mainstream Architecture for Common Knowledge) which I
>> started introducing in the "4th instalment" of my present "MACK
>> basics" series of posts to this list. (And in particular, at this
>> paragraph in it:
>> http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2008-04/msg00109.html#nid022,
>> and continuing on to the end, later supplemented at
>> http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2008-04/msg00112.html.)
>>
>> Thus the static or timeless nature of the basic MACK Form (as of
>> any ER diagram or any ontology) is given the dynamism of realworld
>> semantics by the way the relationship method mediates the
>> event-drivenness that the ER and ontology pictures lack.
>>
>> Then (of course again...) those comments are a good further
>> lead-in to the rather exorbitantly-long-promised 5th instalment,
>> with the subtitle "from simple elements to building applications"
>> which clearly concerns Software Engineering. That's where some
>> kind of orthogonality is a necessary aspect of compositionality of
>> systems of components, as the 5th instalment will indicate at some
>> length.
>>
>> ((The much-regretted delay - getting on to 4 months now! - in that
>> instalment is due to the care I have been trying to take in
>> carefully projecting that part of the MACK picture. And - my
>> apologies! - I have had to let my day jobs intrude too. However,
>> my next paragraph below does apply strongly.))
>>
>> For the coming 5th instalment I have elbowed caution aside and now
>> in advance ask your patience, as in it I am busy spelling out the
>> technical key to this "Ride The Mainstream!" project. I am trying
>> to show how that key is much more fundamentally significant than
>> that apparently-dreary slogan might seem to imply: it refers to
>> the core, the essence, the mainstream of the evolution of
>> cognitive life on Earth, evidently still so poorly exploited,
>> whether in presently-conventional Software Engineering, or in
>> ontologies as currently promoted, or in W3C-style Semantic Web
>> circles.
>>
>> Finally, Max and John, you will both see how the whole MACK
>> approach will tend to reinforce your criticisms of the present
>> Semantic Web and build on your suggestions. We shall indeed "Ride
>> The Mainstream!" together. The "Democratic Web" will indeed
>> improve how we "help people simplify complexity together."
>>
>> The technical details in the 5th instalment will show how those
>> words are not merely poor attempts at yet more demagogy.
>>
>> Christopher
>>
>>
>>
> (017)
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