ontolog-forum
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [ontolog-forum] RDF vs. EAR

To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:34:40 -0500
Message-id: <4EDE9880.3060707@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Ed,    (01)

JFS
>> But XSLT is a horribly inefficient example.    (02)

EB
> As compared to what?  And for what purpose?    (03)

For any transformations of XML of any size, Prolog runs circles
around XSLT in speed, flexibility, and generality.  Many groups
(including our VivoMind company) use Prolog to process anything
we get from the SemWeb -- with a huge improvement in speed and
scalability to large volumes.    (04)

Many gov't agencies are very heavy users of Prolog for many
purposes, but they're rather quiet about what they do with it.
The largest commercial user of Prolog is Experian, one of the
major credit bureaus.  But they are also very quiet about how
they use it.    (05)

But Experian is such a heavy user of Prolog that they bought
Prologia -- the company that was founded by Alain Colmerauer,
who implemented the first version of Prolog.  By buying the
company, they can do all sorts of clever things with it without
telling anybody what they're doing.  Check your favorite search
engine with the terms 'experian' and 'prologia'.    (06)

Another company that is built on Prolog is Mathematica.
Early versions of Mathematica explicitly used Prolog for
their mathematical transformations.  Their current language
still has a Prolog engine at its core, but they have built
so many extensions around it that Prolog is no longer visible.    (07)

EB
> Most data exchange standards that preceded XML were "bad"...    (08)

I agree.  And I approve of using XML for many purposes, as I said
in a previous note.  IBM uses UIMA (also XML based) for representing
NLP data in Watson, but UIMA is more concise and efficient than RDF.    (09)

But the best uses of the *ML family are for the purposes that GML
was originally designed to support:  marking up documents.  That is
still their "sweet spot".  For embedding languages in *ML documents,
the script-tag (or the equivalent) is still the best method.    (010)

EB
> The idea of XML was to discard efficiency for simplicity and clarity    (011)

Discarding efficiency is a very, very bad idea.  Computer speeds are
growing, but the volumes and complexity of the data are growing even
faster.  If you want to process data in the browser, JavaScript (or
the proposals for a next generation script) are vastly better than
interpreting any extensive amount of XLST or similar notations.    (012)

EB
> Enter XSLT -- the means of translation between simple XML encodings    (013)

Google has a lot of experience in processing web data, and they have
chosen JSON as the foundation for Google apps.  They'll index anything
thrown at them, but they don't use XSLT.    (014)

EB
> Never underestimate the value of simple tools for simple tasks.    (015)

Amen, Amen.  We certainly agree on that point.    (016)

But JSON is vastly simpler than any XML-based encoding, and every
browser has JavaScript built in to process it.  Google knows that.    (017)

Bottom line:  RDF/XML is the poison pill that is killing the SemWeb,
and their salvation depends on dumping it ASAP.    (018)

John    (019)

_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/  
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/  
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ 
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J    (020)

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>