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Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontologies for hybrid connectionist-semantic systems

To: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Obrst, Leo J." <lobrst@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2010 21:18:57 -0500
Message-id: <0111C34BD897FD41841D60396F2AD3D304DE77ADB2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
John,    (01)

OWL is primarily a description logic, and as such DLs were/are a paradigm in 
AI. OWL specifically is both frame-based and DL in nature, by design. You may 
not like it, but that is a different story.    (02)

Because I am interested in rule-based reasoning, when I use OWL for complex 
applications, I have combined it with SWRL and used a logic-programming 
environment for reasoning (Prolog or actually a combined DL+Prolog 
environment). This gives me approximately FOL reasoning. Or I don't use OWL and 
instead I use Cyc or HighFleet's (formerly Ontology Works) deductive database, 
or simply Prolog, or sometimes a theorem prover such as Vampire or Prover9. 
Why? Because indeed description logics are primarily useful for 
classificational reasoning. And often one wants more.     (03)

PowerSet, so we think, since it came out of PARC, largely used Lexical 
Functional Grammar (LFG) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), 
graph-unificational linguistic theories developed primarily in the 1980s. 
Typically these do have an expression in FOL. Of course they don't use RDF or 
OWL (at least to my limited knowledge), since the latter are subsequent to LFG 
and HPSG.     (04)

Thanks,
Leo    (05)

_____________________________________________ 
Dr. Leo Obrst        The MITRE Corporation, Information Semantics 
lobrst@xxxxxxxxx     Information Discovery & Understanding, Command & Control 
Center
Voice: 703-983-6770  7515 Colshire Drive, M/S H305 
Fax: 703-983-1379    McLean, VA 22102-7508, USA    (06)

      (07)


-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: Friday, December 03, 2010 8:09 PM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontologies for hybrid connectionist-semantic 
systems    (08)

Leo,    (09)

> Of course OWL was designed for AI work.    (010)

No.  It was designed for the Semantic Web.  Tim B-L consistently
said that the goal of the Semantic Web was not AI or NLP, and
most AI researchers vomit when they are forced to look at OWL.    (011)

I agree with the following statement:    (012)

> The entire description logic paradigm comes out of AI.    (013)

Yes, but DL technology, which has been available for 30 years,
is only one of many ways for representing and reasoning about
ontology.  And the recommended way of using DLs was for hybrid
systems that combine the DLs with other reasoning methods.    (014)

> And it's been used for NLP too.    (015)

Hierarchies of concept types are very important for NLP,
but there are two serious limitations of OWL:    (016)

  1. For representing hierarchies, OWL is overkill.  There are
     vastly simpler and more efficient tools for the kinds
     of hierarchies used in NLP.    (017)

  2. OWL is too limited to represent and reason with the
     information expressed in NLP.    (018)

Hybrid systems that use simpler tools for the hierarchies and
richer tools for representation and reasoning are far more common.    (019)

Today, Google does more machine translation than any other
company on earth, but they do not use RDF or OWL.    (020)

PowerSet is a large NLP company designed for question/answering,
and they were bought by Microsoft, but they do not use RDF or OWL.    (021)

Experian, one of the three largest credit bureaus, uses Prolog
for everything.  In fact, they bought Prologia -- the company
founded by Alain Colmerauer, who implemented the first version
of Prolog.    (022)

We have to counter the knee-jerk reaction that OWL is the
default ontology language.  It's useful for some purposes,
but its rate of adoption is very slow.    (023)

John    (024)

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