Ed, (01)
>
>With all due respect, you haven't listened closely enough to the various
>sides of that discussion. Description Logic is not "widely" considered
>to be the most useful framework, let alone the only practical one. It
>is considered to be practical for Semantic Web purposes -- assisting in
>the search for information relevant to a topic by marking up documents
>as to their content, where content is defined by an ontology. And
>_some_ OWL/DL ontologies can be strong enough to be useful in other ways.
> (02)
I would like you to be right about the balance of efforts and results, since I
come from the Prolog side of it. But that is not what I see happening. I have
been looking quite hard for any practical intersection between general
application programming and logic programming. I see RDF and OWL apearing more
and more often in the main stream application development. For example, in Web
Services discovery and integration. I see much less interest to integrating
business rules and workflow with Web Services and other components. If you see
something different I would like to hear about it. (03)
>IMO, the main advantage of OWL in the Web community is that it has begun
>to squelch the idea that XML Schema is an information modeling language.
> OWL/DL is somewhat more capable of representing knowledge than UML
>class diagrams, and it is rigorously defined, which is a major plus. So
>it is a good language for producing domain models, and it encourages
>much better practice in the communities that formulate exchange
>standards, another major plus.
>
>How good it is as a language for capturing knowledge models used for
>formal reasoning is "quite another thing entirely". DL is not a silver
>bullet. You have to give up a lot of expressiveness to get the strong
>computational bounding that is characteristic of tableaux reasoning.
> (04)
It looks to me like what you have to give up is not attainable anyway. I am not
talking about theorem provers, cryptography or proof-carrying code. But for
open information exchange and application integration computational bounding is
critical. I recently read report on translating large medical ontology into OWL
and performing basic inference that took 35 min with 15Gbite of RAM. I wonder
what would it take to do it with Prolog. (05)
>> This had been discussed on this forum many times, often comparing
>> Prolog and OWL as representing competing alternatives for encoding
>> knowledge. The jury is still out on it, I think.
>
>Indeed. Each has its place in the larger world of knowledge
>engineering. And so do First-order logic reasoners, and some others.
> (06)
If I remember it correctly FOL generally is not decidable and most of
complexity results on FOL reasoners are NP hard (i.e not practical). Again, I
am not an expert, but I do listen. Please tell me any good news on application
of FOL in general application development. (07)
>> But it should be clear that simply translating SQL to English is not
>> a viable approach.
>
>Now as to that, I fully agree. (Sorry, Adrian.)
>
>-Ed
>
>--
>Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
>National Institute of Standards & Technology
>Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
>100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263 Tel: +1 301-975-3528
>Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263 FAX: +1 301-975-4694
>
>"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
> and have not been reviewed by any Government authority."
>
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> (08)
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