----- Original Message -----
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sunday, March 28, 2010 8:39 am
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Re Foundation ontology, CYC, and Mapping
To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
[...]
> KDK> If you're using contexts (quads in OWL/RDF), then sets of
> > observations (graphs) may also be considered as things, with
> > attributed provenance.
>
> That brings in even more terminology. If I use CL as the lingua
> franca, I would map OWL expressions to CL expressions and talk
> about them using CL terminology. (01)
Unfortunately one area where CL is unhappily confused is precisely here: what
is the difference between a "module" and a "text"? Which one should I use to
represent context logic? (02)
> KDK> ... but I think that such a powerful framework is not really
> > needed for this particular use case.
>
> That's what everybody says when they start a new project. They
> say that they want something simple, but when the ISO standard
> is written, it's as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.
>
> Eventually, they discover that it also happens to be incompatible
> with every other special standard. As a result, the financial
> department of a company can't relate their data to the departments
> for engineering, manufacturing, sales... (03)
How would specifying them all in FOL reduce this problem? As far as I can see,
the problem is not the formalisms, it's the content. (04)
> KDK> Since the time period of that work, the financial sector has
> > been steadily adopting the XBRL standard for financial reporting,
> > which indeed provides a mechanism for a definition of every
> reported > item to be specified through a URI.
>
> Do you remember R. V. Guha? He was the associate director of Cyc,
> which he left in the early 1990s. (I don't know his exact reasons,
> so I won't speculate why.)
>
> But one thing he said was that the full power of Cyc was too great,
> and he wanted to define something very simple that would be adequate
> for most purposes. He thought that triples were the simplest useful
> notation, and he teamed up with Tim Bray to represent triples in XML.
> That was the origin of RDF.
>
> But as time went on, those triples kept getting more complex because
> XML had lots of "features" that people thought were "convenient" for
> some purpose or other. Unfortunately, they "took advantage" of those
> features and RDF(S) became more and more complex. Then OWL was built
> on top of RDF, and it became more complex and morphed into multiple
> versions.
>
> If you look at the Common Logic standard, it's both *more powerful*
> and *much simpler* than what RDF and OWL became. See Section 6 of the
> ISO 24707 standard, which takes just 12 pages (pp. 8 to 19) for the
> abstract syntax and semantics. The full standard takes 80 pages,
> but that includes 11 more pages of explanation, 50 pages to define
> three different concrete dialects, and 7 pages of bibliography. (05)
I think we have a different view of what is "simpler". If you start with only
FOL, then you need to define arithmetic before you can move on to defining what
is a valid financial report. This may be easy enough to do, but unless you
adopt a standard way of doing so the common foundation in FOL won't have gained
you anything. (06)
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