Re: [ontolog-forum] unnatural language

[Adrian Walker <adriandwalker@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi David --

As usual, you ask the good questions.

Adrian:
> You have kindly made a strong argument for writing 
> in Executable English** rather than in Java, C, etc.

David:

And how is this Executable English magic going to make the connection between "dunning" (e.g. hound for payment of a debt) and MENSA-FL?  Even when the acronym is "translated" to MEssage Notify Stop Action FLag, there's no visible, direct connection to the dunning activity.

Adrian:

Well, in Executable English, you would spell out the concept rather than try to shoehorn it into a few bytes.  Then you would make the connection using the techniques shown in slides 24-32 and 40-52 of the following:

www.reengineeringllc.com/Internet_Business_Logic_and_Semantic_Web_Presentation.pdf

                        Cheers,  -- Adrian
                   
** Internet Business Logic
A Wiki and SOA Endpoint for Executable Open Vocabulary English over SQL and RDF
Online at www.reengineeringllc.com    
Shared use is free, and there are no advertisements

Adrian Walker
Reengineering

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 1:06 PM, David Eddy <deddy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Adrian -

On Mar 26, 2010, at 12:08 PM, Adrian Walker wrote:

You have kindly made a strong argument for writing in Executable English** rather than in Java, C, etc.

And how is this Executable English magic going to make the connection between "dunning" (e.g. hound for payment of a debt) and MENSA-FL?  Even when the acronym is "translated" to MEssage Notify Stop Action FLag, there's no visible, direct connection to the dunning activity.

To repeat... I issue my "natural language" (Personal observation: "natural language" is just as much an oxymoron, if not more, as "military intelligence.") query to some unknown cloud of systems in the bowels of the organization.  Who/how/what makes the connection between "dunning" and what it's actually labeled (MENSA-FL) inside the operational system?

Sorry... "it should have a better/more meaningful label" is NOT an option.  That horse left the barn decades ago.

EE is indexed by Google, and non-programmers can read it.  The results of computations are explained, in English, at the business level.

To repeat... how is "business level English" connected to cryptic labels inside a collection of 10-20-30-40-50 year old systems?

Same problem, different piece of data... I'm looking for "social security number"... how do I find SSN, soc_sec_no, SOC-SEC-NBR, tax_id, emplID, EIN, TIN, SIN....?

The worst (best?) I've heard is 70 different names for policy number... I've never heard anyone offer how many different names/labels for "social security number" but I assume it would be at least several dozen.

Also a comment about Google... because it's really based on the word counting model plus its corpus is the 100s of millions of WRITTEN TO BE READ BY HUMANS web pages, it lulls us into complacency.  You Google a term (maybe even a phrase!!!!) & zingo you get 10,000,000 hits.  Think about your own personal use... how often do you go beyond the middle of the first page?

But in the enterprise what you're seeking when you ask for "social security number" is driven by the CEO's "request" to remove social security number from ALL—repeat ALL—unnecessary uses.  The significant difference here is the ***ALL*** not just a few interesting potential references.  Remember, you're going across documents—e.g. software source code—that were NOT written for human consumption.

___________________

David Eddy

deddy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

781-455-0949

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