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Re: [ontolog-forum] Next steps in using ontologies as standards

To: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Mills Davis <lmd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:57:55 -0500
Message-id: <DF260729-411B-48FC-9CA4-40B4F135AC85@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Duane,    (01)

Isn't the call-to-action here for Adobe (and other technology  
suppliers) to adopt an approach that provides a more capable foundation?    (02)

Mills    (03)

On Jan 20, 2009, at 2:18 PM, Duane Nickull wrote:    (04)

> Hmm - maybe Adobe should claim RDF.net?  After all, XMP metadata is  
> used by most people (anyone who works with CS4, PDF etc) on a daily  
> basis.  Even Eric Miller (W3C) stated Adobe was making significant  
> strides in the semantic web (although I personally disagree).  All  
> XMP is doing is making declaration, open to interpretation by the  
> reader/viewer.
>
> Duane
>
>
> On 20/01/09 11:10 AM, "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Pat,
>
> I'm sorry for going overboard in the metaphors, but I get
> frustrated by people who ignore good technology that proved
> its worth in favor of half-vast schemes that nobody would
> have adopted without the hype that was dumped on them.
>
> PH> Nobody, even the people who wrote their specs, claim that
>> RDF and OWL are the ultimate solution or to all problems.
>
> That is certainly true.  The two people who gave us RDF were
> Guha and Tim Bray.  Guha was the former associate director of
> Cyc, and he became disillusioned with its complexity.  I don't
> blame him for that.
>
> But I do blame Guha for being far too shortsighted.  He felt that
> most programmers were too stupid to learn logic, and he wanted
> to give them a baby language that they could deal with.  What he
> ignored was the fact that the WHERE-clause of SQL supports full
> FOL, and every major commercial web site was built around RDBs.
>
> I don't have to blame Tim Bray, because he apologized for his
> mistakes in designing RDF.  His major criticism of RDF was
> "It's the syntax, stupid!":
>
>    http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/21/RDFNet
>
> PH> RDF syntax is in fact (that is, definitively according to the
>> specs) defined abstractly, as a graph.
>
> I certainly like graphs.  But see the mistakes by Guha and Bray.
>
> PH> [RDF and OWL] represent a viable approach to the problem they
>> were designed for, which was to be machine2machine communication
>> notations for the semantic web...
>
> They're viable in the same sense that a duckbilled platypus is viable.
> But the world had developed far better technologies many years ago,
> implemented them in relational databases, integrated them with the  
> WWW,
> and taught them to programmers around the world.
>
> There was no excuse to go back to triples when everybody was happy
> with N-tuples.  There was no excuse to ignore FOL when all the
> databases of the world supported WHERE clauses that could express
> full FOL.
>
> I certainly admit that SQL is not the world's best notation for FOL,
> but typed Datalog is an excellent notation that can be mapped to
> both an SQL-like notation for RDBs and an English-like notation
> for people who are familiar with those forms.
>
> I'm not recommending that we throw away the work that was done in
> RDF and OWL.  But it's time to recognize that they are not the best
> foundation for the future, they should be treated as legacy systems,
> and we should promote a better foundation that is integrated with  
> RDBs.
>
> As I said in my previous note, we can do that by moving from N3 and
> RDF to N-N, moving from OWL, SPARQL, and RuleML to typed Datalog,
> and introducing controlled NLs for readability by human beings who
> are not programmers.
>
> John
>
>
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>    (05)


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