It might be worth looking at the literature being created by Oren
Etzioni and his colleagues at U.Washington, particularly in relation
to two projects: KnowItAll and TextRunner. (01)
They do not directly address this need, but perhaps there are hints.
DARPA recently launched a "machine reading" initiative that seems
related. (02)
Jack (03)
On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 9:52 PM, Patrick Cassidy <pat@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> David,
>
>>> I want something--MT? Ontology support?--that can read Fortran, Jovial,
>>> COBOL. Java, PHP, Ruby, C, etc. (oops... that's a computer language)
>>> documents & make (more) sense out of said documents. These are textual
>>> artifacts (therefore "documents"?) which may or may not be written by
>>> humans, they're decidedly NOT edited for readability, and they are really
>>> not intended for human consumption.
>
>
>
> I believe that current ontology technology, or extensions of it (to include
> procedural attachments) has the technical capability to do such things. But
> non-trivial applications will be quite labor-intensive to implement.
>
>
>
> As I see it, ontology technology is still in its infancy – or perhaps still
> embryonic. I have had great difficulty finding any publicly inspectable
> (open source) applications that go much beyond an advanced version of
> database information retrieval – adding in a little logical inference, but
> not using that inference to do anything conspicuously more impressive than
> RDB’s themselves. CYC suggests it has built applications that do that, but
> we do not have them available for public testing – and much of CYC is still
> proprietary, a big turn-off for those who need a language that can be used
> freely.
>
>
>
> John Sowa has told us that he uses a combination of techniques to solve
> knotty problems efficiently. I believe that is what will be very effective
> in general, but for that to work outside the confines of a single group –
> i.e. to enable multiple separately developed agents to cooperate in solving
> a problem- they will also need a common language to accurately communicate
> information.
>
>
>
> The problem, as I perceive it is that, although up to now there has been
> great progress in understanding the science (mathematical properties) of
> inference – for which we can be grateful to the mathematicians and logicians
> - understanding inference only provides a **grammar** and a minimal basic
> **semantics** for a language that computers can understand. What we have
> very little agreement on is the **vocabulary**, without which there is no
> useful language. For computers to properly interpret each other’s data, it
> is necessary to have a common vocabulary – or vocabularies that can be
> **accurately** translated. Such a translation mechanism is possible if a
> common foundation ontology were adopted, which would have representations of
> all the fundamental concepts necessary to logically describe the domain
> concepts of the ontologies in programs that need to communicate data. It
> is a measure of the pre-scientific nature of the field that there is
> actually even disagreement about the need for a common foundation ontology.
> To me it is blindingly obvious – one cannot communicate without a common
> language (including vocabulary); there are no exceptions. But most efforts
> at interoperability among separately developed ontologies currently focus on
> developing mappings in some automated manner – which any inspection
> immediately reveals cannot be done with enough accuracy to allow machines to
> make mission-critical decisions based on such inaccurate mappings. Accurate
> mappings are possible via a common foundation ontology. But for reasons
> that I believe are not based on relevant technical considerations, there is
> little enthusiasm for developing such an ontology at present. Past efforts
> have failed, because they depended on voluntary commitment of a great deal
> of time from participants in order to find common ground among a large
> enough user community. What will work is if a large developing community is
> **paid** to build and test a common foundation ontology and demonstrate its
> capability for broad general semantic interoperability. I am certain it
> will happen sometime that such an ontology will be developed, because the
> need for it and benefits of it are so compelling. The only question for me
> is how much time and money will be wasted before such a widely used
> foundation ontology is developed and tested in multiple applications – and
> who will pay for it.
>
>
>
> So, I believe that current ontology technology provides the basis to tackle
> the problems you cite, but I don’t know of any off-the-shelf programs that
> can do that now. Perhaps someone has developed one?
>
>
>
> Pat
>
>
>
>
>
> Patrick Cassidy
>
> MICRA, Inc.
>
> 908-561-3416
>
> cell: 908-565-4053
>
> cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
>
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> (04)
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