Re: [ontolog-forum] Oooh, FOL is too hard to learn.

[Adrian Walker <adriandwalker@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ian --

You wrote:  If it [logic] weren't so awkward, more people might use it for commercial applications.

There seem to be two ways to go with this -- graphics, and natural language.

John Sowa can tell about the virtues of graphics in the form of Conceptual Graphs.

For lightweight natural language knowledge input and use, you may like to consider Executable English, as in

as a step towards energy independence, the US would like to reduce oil imports by some-number barrels per year
to convert from Quadrillion Btu to barrels of gasoline, multiply by some-factor
that-number / that-factor = some-quadrillion-btu
liquid fuel has an average price of some-amount in 2030 (2007 $ per Million Btu)
that-amount * 1000000000 = some-price-per-quadrillion-btu
those-quadrillion-btu * that-price-per-quadrillion-btu = some-total$
that-total$ / 1000000000 = some-total
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
as a step towards energy independence, the US would like to reduce the cost of oil imports by that-total billion 2007 $ by 2030

See also [1-4].

Anyone have a third way?

                      Cheers,  -- Adrian

[1]  http://www.reengineeringllc.com/Business_Rules_and_OMG_SBVR_Presentation.pdf
  
[2]  http://www.reengineeringllc.com/A_Wiki_for_Business_Rules_in_Open_Vocabulary_Executable_English.pdf

[3]  http://www.reengineeringllc.com/Oil_Industry_Supply_Chain_by_Kowalski_and_Walker.pdf

[4]  Internet Business Logic
A Wiki and SOA Endpoint for Executable Open Vocabulary English Q/A over SQL and RDF
Online at www.reengineeringllc.com    
Shared use is free, and there are no advertisements

Adrian Walker
Reengineering

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Ian Bailey <ian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi John,

You wrote:

... people said  "Oooh, FOL is too hard to learn."

Which is true. CL (pick any dialect you like) is difficult to work with. If
it weren't so awkward, more people might use it for commercial applications.
Until that day, people will work with more productive, intuitive notations,
that unfortunately are somewhat less formal - they still work, mind you.

Maybe the CL/FOL community need to employ some HCI folks to help them
develop the next generation of modelling notation, because what's there in
CL now just isn't going to cut it with the average developer or data
modeller.

Ian


-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: 18 October 2010 19:46
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Interpreting OWL

I agree with Ed's characterization of all the interrelationships
of the many, many notations.  My short summary:

 1. There are a huge number of ad hoc declarative notations, all
    of which have only one thing in common:  they are subsets
    of first-order logic, usually with some special-purpose
    built-in ontology and a methodology for using it.

 2. For any two notations X and Y, it is often possible to find
    a mapping of some subset of X to some subset of Y, but no
    guarantee that the methodology and ontologies designed for X
    are compatible with those of Y.

 3. RDF is compatible with almost all of them because it is
    a lowest-common-denominator subset of all of them.

 4. But RDF has a bloated, unreadable notation that even its
    designer (Tim Bray) disowned, and nearly everybody invents
    some special-purpose way of saying or writing (A B C).

What got us into this mess is that people said "Oooh, FOL is
too hard to learn."  So everybody invented a different notation
for writing some version of it, and nobody gave any thought
to how their version related to anybody else's.

For further commentary on these issues, see

   http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/iss.pdf
   Integrating Semantic Systems

John




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