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Re: [ontolog-forum] What goes into a Lexicon?

To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:09:38 -0500
Message-id: <4F450532.705@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Dear Matthew, Doug, and Paul,    (01)

PT
>> I have only a dim understanding of finance...    (02)

MW
> Clearly.    (03)

I agree with Matthew.    (04)

DF
> Moving to triples is a step far backward for people who have their
> information in databases which have rows and columns.  It is an awkward,
> but doable method of sending data which naturally falls in non-sparse
> matrices.
>
> If the Semantic Web had come up with a better syntax than triples, it
> would be far more used, imho.    (05)

I agree.  And that is one reason (among many) why Google, Microsoft,
and Yahoo! abandoned RDF in favor of JSON.  You can upload and download
any DB structure -- RDB or OODB -- to and from JSON without making any
changes to the native structure.  JSON also has a one-to-one mapping
to and from the data structures of every major programming language.
RDF doesn't.  Finally, JSON is efficient, and RDF is a bloated dog.    (06)

DF
> But how many times as many dollars does it cost to create a system using
> URIs?  Certainly enterprises would not wish to spend 20-100 times as much
> for data storage by using URIs.  The increased bandwidth would also be a
> great cost.    (07)

There are cases where RDF is mapped to highly efficient graph DBs,
but they all use internal representations for which JSON would be
a more efficient external notation than RDF.  Facebook, for example,
uses Open Graph DB, with their own notation that was inspired by a
subset of RDFa, but they don't use RDFa or RDF.  See http://ogp.me/    (08)

DF
> How many corporations want to put their corporate data in open data sets?    (09)

Most commercial web sites use relational databases for their inventory
and sales.  Those unfortunate souls who tried to convert a commercial
RDB to RDF triples were fired by a very angry management who responded
to very angry users.    (010)

PT
> I agree it is normally not prudent to get ahead of established practice.
> But I don't consider much of past practice (in the IT realm) to be worth
> saving.    (011)

Any system that has been in use for any period of time has acquired
a lot of entropy (AKA crud) that needs to be cleaned up.  But that
does not imply that replacing a relational DB with triples is a
good idea.    (012)

PT
>> I agree it is normally not prudent to get ahead of established practice.
>> But I don't consider much of past practice (in the IT realm) to be worth
>> saving.    (013)

DF
> Here, i agree.    (014)

I agree with the literal sense of Paul's statement.  But the tone
in which it's written sounds like a freshly minted computer science
graduate who gets hired by an ongoing business.  Then he succeeds
in persuading management to convert their RDBs to RDF.  When they
see what happens, he gets fired, and management has to fight hard
to avoid bankruptcy.    (015)

John    (016)

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