Patrick Cassidy wrote:
> John,
> Just one point:
>
> PC>> ... we are not starting from scratch, but using *everything*
> >> freely usable from the OpenCyc???
>
> [JS] > I wasn't looking at OpenCyc, but at Cyc, which is the closest thing
> to what you're proposing. But Cyc hasn't been able to solve any of the
> interoperability problems well enough to provide a positive return on
> investment.
>
> PC>> It seems you haven't read my point-by-point enumeration of
> > the reasons.
>
> [JS] > I've read them all. None of them answer the question why Cyc has not
> already solved the interoperability problem -- even partially.
>
> I have previously mentioned that Cycorp is in fact making most of their
> money now from a large project to integrate the DB's of a health care
> company. So at least one large organization is convinced that Cyc can
> successfully solve their interoperability problem better than a traditional
> federated database or data warehouse.
>
> But such project are very expensive, which makes them rare, and even when
> they succeed it may not be feasible for outsiders to evaluate the "success"
> of such proprietary projects. That is why we need an open consortium, using
> a common, open ontology, so that at least some successful ontology-based
> projects are visible to everyone.
>
I suspect that success will be well known. Failure might be harder to
discover.
> Pat
>
>
> Patrick Cassidy
> MICRA, Inc.
> 908-561-3416
> cell: 908-565-4053
> cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
>> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
>> Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2009 11:34 AM
>> To: [ontolog-forum]
>> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] standard ontology
>>
>> Don and Pat C,
>>
>> Before getting to Pat's comments, I'll start with Don's, which
>> I strongly endorse.
>>
>> DC> My experiences with DOD affirm your [Pat C's] comment in that
>> > they want an order of magnitude advance from semantic technologies.
>> > But the hard truth is that the more tightly a domain is focused,
>> > the more a relational DB solution will equal, or better a semantic
>> > solution. At much less cost and difficulty.
>>
>> The only point I disagree with is the implication that a relational
>> database is *not* a vital part of a semantic solution. I realize
>> that the current SQL standards leave a great deal to be desired,
>> and most of the limitations were forced on SQL by the awkward
>> initial design, which IBM considered an unfinished research project.
>>
>> Other relational DBs (the original Ingres, for example) had much
>> better query languages. Unfortunately, Oracle took the raw SQL
>> from the IBM research reports, commercialized it, and made it
>> a de facto standard.
>>
>> When Ted Codd saw Prolog, his initial reaction was "I wish I had
>> invented that." The Datalog language is essentially a very clean
>> subset of Prolog designed for DB assertions, constraints, rules,
>> and queries. A typed version of Datalog would be an excellent
>> upgrade from SQL *and* the Semantic Web.
>>
>> As evidence for the thirty years of outstanding R & D on semantics
>> related to databases (both relational and object-oriented), I'll
>> cite the series of books on DB semantics:
>>
>> http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/ds/index.html
>>
>> This is a series of nine books, which are based on conferences
>> sponsored by the IFIP Working Group TC2/2.6 on Database Semantics.
>> The first one was in 1985, after 15 years of R & D on both the
>> practical and theoretical issues of relational databases. There
>> are many other excellent books on deductive databases and their
>> relationship to knowledge bases, but these books include a good
>> sampling of that work.
>>
>> The last book in this series appeared in April 2001. Not so
>> coincidentally, there was a major gathering of the early
>> Semantic Web tribe at Stanford in July 2001. Somebody had
>> said that the Semantic Web "sucked the wind out of" all those
>> other projects, but Pat Hayes defended the Semantic Webbers
>> by saying that there were many outstanding people working
>> on SW projects. I agree. Those are people who were sucked
>> out of other semantic projects by the multimillions of euros
>> that were dumped on the SW.
>>
>> DC> Fielding large scale, operational semantic systems is not
>> > yet feasible because the supporting infrastructure is not
>> > in place. For example, look in the Sunday paper job ads for
>> > oracle DB administrators. Then look for ontologist ads...
>>
>> Nearly every major commercial web site (and many, many minor
>> ones) are built around relational databases. If the SW
>> designers had chosen Datalog as their primary language and
>> integrated it with both relational and network DBs, they
>> would have built the supporting infrastructure long ago.
>> The DB administrators and the ontologists would be working
>> together seamlessly, and the number of job ads for the
>> combination would be far greater than the sum for both.
>>
>> DC> Unfortunately, as it takes money to make money, success
>> > breeds success. Fielded semantic systems that work will
>> > garner more funds for the application of those technologies.
>>
>> I agree. And there are many small (and some very large) groups
>> that are combining logic-based languages such as Prolog, Datalog,
>> and others with very large relational and object-oriented DBs.
>> An example is Experian -- one of the three large companies that
>> monitor everybody's credit. They not only use Prolog for their
>> inferences, they bought the Prologia company, which was founded
>> by Alain Colmerauer, the person who implemented the first version
>> of Prolog. If you type "experian prolog" to Google, you'll get
>> 5,870 hits.
>>
>> You won't see many published papers about such applications
>> because (a) they're no longer research issues, (b) the people
>> who are using Prolog are busy working on practical problems,
>> and (c) the successful companies don't want to tell their
>> competitors how they make money.
>>
>> DC> The DOD entities I've dealt with typically seek to integrate
>> > some number of relational DB's, sometimes with unstructured data.
>> > But within a fairly tight domain (yes, there is a range to the
>> > domain focus).
>> >
>> > Interoperability, while given much lip service, lags the commercial
>> > world. The DOD XML Registry was going to be the solution...still
>> > waiting on that one. By the way, where is the ontology repository
>> > and how capable is it?
>>
>> I like the idea of a registry/repository, but there is a serious
>> issue with any open source project: giving things away for free is
>> usually a poor business model. Eclipse ( http://www.eclipse.org/ )
>> is an outstanding example of a successful project. But it was
>> started by IBM as a proprietary platform for software development.
>> When IBM realized that they couldn't make a profit from Eclipse,
>> they gave it away to an industry consortium.
>>
>> Linux is another example of a successful project that began with
>> a well-defined target (Unix), a large collection of tools (Gnu),
>> and a benevolent, dedicated dictator who also happened to be
>> a superprogrammer (Linus Torvalds).
>>
>> OpenOffice is an outstanding freebie, which also began as a commercial
>> system (StarOffice), which Sun bought and couldn't sell profitably.
>> So they gave away the code and sell services based on the StarOffice
>> superset. But Sun has not been successful in attracting many
>> free contributors to the OpenOffice code base.
>>
>> I think that the Eclipse model is the best one to emulate, but that
>> means the emphasis would have to be on the development tools, which
>> have to be very good in order to attract a significant number of
>> users and contributors.
>>
>> PC> ... we are not starting from scratch, but using *everything*
>> > freely usable from the OpenCyc???
>>
>> I wasn't looking at OpenCyc, but at Cyc, which is the closest thing
>> to what you're proposing. But Cyc hasn't been able to solve any
>> of the interoperability problems well enough to provide a positive
>> return on investment.
>>
>> PC> It seems you haven't read my point-by-point enumeration of
>> > the reasons.
>>
>> I've read them all. None of them answer the question why Cyc has
>> not already solved the interoperability problem -- even partially.
>>
>> PC> I have already detailed reasons why Cyc in its present form and
>> > with its present management cannot serve as a common foundation
>> > ontology acceptable to a broad community.
>>
>> The present management and stockholders would be delighted to be
>> bought out for a fraction of the funding you're asking for.
>>
>> PC> Where Doug's original model failed is that he thought that he
>> > only had to develop a competent ontology, and could then license
>> > it to users....
>>
>> No. Doug and his group worked long and hard with very competent
>> people at universities, government agencies, and stakeholders at
>> some large companies with very good research divisions. Those
>> companies had large applications, and they had top-notch people
>> with excellent backgrounds in AI and comp. sci. The license they
>> signed with Cycorp gave them *all* Cyc software with unlimited,
>> royalty-free rights to use in any way they saw fit. But none
>> of them found any useful applications for Cyc.
>>
>> PC> ... to develop a community that uses some FO that can translate
>> > from Cyc and any other ontology into each other, and to demonstrate
>> > its usefulness by producing open-source applications and utilities,
>> > especially an NL interface, to make it easier to use.
>>
>> That is the wishfulest of wishful thinking. Which open-source model
>> are you proposing? Eclipse? Linux? OpenOffice?
>>
>> All three of them started with a very precisely defined structure.
>> In comparison, FO is pie in the sky with a vague hope that somebody
>> someday might discover something useful.
>>
>> PC> I have said repeatedly that if there were a broadly representative
>> > community of users that openly shared their applications and
>> > utilities, any competent foundation ontology, including Cyc,
>> > could be used as a starting point...
>>
>> Where are you going to find that Utopian community? Please look
>> at the existing open source projects. The overwhelming majority of
>> projects hosted by Sourceforge are dead or moribund. Competitors
>> don't share their applications and utilities because they want
>> to make money from them. The only ones they share are ones they
>> can't make money from -- e.g. IBM's contribution of Eclipse, Sun's
>> contribution of OpenOffice, or Cyc's contribution of OpenCyc.
>>
>> PC> Inertia is immense. Getting someone to put up money to prove
>> > that the ontology will help their applications is very hard.
>>
>> I talked with very knowledgeable managers at research groups that
>> had paid to be Cyc stakeholders. I asked them how they were using it.
>> They said that people in their departments had tried to use Cyc for
>> various applications, but none of them could demonstrate that it gave
>> them any advantage. One manager said flatly, "Several people have
>> worked with Cyc over the past few years, and all of them were fired.
>> I don't believe that was a coincidence."
>>
>> PC> I feel certain that it is impossible for anyone person to create
>> > a demo that is sufficiently more impressive than traditional IT
>> > methods so as to break through the consciousness of managers who
>> > could fund real projects.
>>
>> The manager I mentioned above had an excellent knowledge of both AI
>> and traditional methods of software development. The people who were
>> fired were PhDs who were given the chance to collaborate with IT
>> people in their company on those projects. But they *failed*.
>>
>> PC> As an example, consider language understanding....
>>
>> At VivoMind, we got very good results in language understanding,
>> and we don't use anything that remotely resembles your FO. See
>> the following talk and the URLs in the last slide:
>>
>> http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/pursue.pdf
>>
>> PC> The point I will emphasize, every time I hear such an argument,
>> > is that the cost of *not* undertaking such a program (or multiple
>> > such programs, if any others are proposed) is even higher. That's
>> > important enough to repeat.
>>
>> Without evidence, that claim is wishful thinking, and repeating it
>> doesn't make it more convincing.
>>
>> John
>>
>>
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