Dear John and David,
Your conversation ended with:
DE
> So what's the
purpose/value/utility of the ontology view?
>If grunts are working
away with their local vocabularies/jargon/local opaque language (& VERY
unlikely to be aware of the ontology in the background),
> what is the value add
of the ontology?
That is a good question.
But you can only answer a question about value in terms of problems that are
solved better, faster, or cheaper.
Recommendation: Instead
of proposing yet another syntax, data model, semantic theory, or super
algorithm, I suggest we focus on *problems* that people actually need to solve
-- and *how* ontology could help solve them within a reasonable time frame.
…
John
I agree with both of you on this issue. What is the
value of any tool (including ontology)? It is in solving problems. But what
problems (other than Dublin
Core sized ones) are solvable by ontologies?
We have long discussed how ontologies make “interoperability”
easier, but so far there is not one example of it. Ontologies might help
linguists solve problems in translation, interpretation, or communication, but
what problems (including those categories) have actually been solved yet by
some ontology?
If we could find a few good, public examples, perhaps
we could analyze the success of the projects at solving real problems.
JMHO,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: Wednesday, February 29, 2012 9:14 AM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What
goes into a Lexicon?
Paul, Doug, Pat, Kingsley, Leo, and David,
As I'm writing this note, there is a talk show on the
radio in the
background. The host is in New York, and somebody called on their
iPhone while being stuck in traffic in Abu Dhabi. That is an
example
of what successful technology can do.
As for ontology, I'd like to ask what problems we
might solve that
(1) could have a comparable impact on society, (2)
take advantage
of the existing IT infrastructure, and (3) be built in
a time frame
comparable to the development of the iPhone.
PT
> I assume your comments in this thread are in the
> mode of a professor heckling his seminarians to
defend their theses, and
> are not charged with any personal animosity
towards those who favor this
> or that technology.
I have no animosity whatever about any technical
disagreements.
But I am *not* trying to heckle academics. I love
academic studies,
but there's a huge gap between a PhD thesis and a
product -- or between
a committee of academics and something that works.
PT
> My operating formula is simple: I adopt any
technology, methodology,
> principle, or practice that helps this aim; I
avoid what doesn't; I
> assail what degrades it; and I assay what shows
promise.
I agree with the principle. But instead of asking for
"promise", I
suggest that we ask how and whether we could achieve
the success
of the iPhone, Google, Facebook, etc.
DF
> The [W3C] have been too concerned with simplicity
(imho), restricting
> statements to sets of triples and limiting the
expressiveness for the
> purpose of decidability.
>
> Mainstream IT does not restrict its languages to
ones that guarantee
> that any program written in them will complete in
polynomial time.
> Mainstream IT looks at the simplified tools,
concepts, and standards
> of the Semantic Web and finds that they do not
meet their needs.
Mainstream IT needs something that works. They have
engineers who solve
problems within the constraints of budgets, deadlines,
and resources.
The SW gave them tools that are completely
disconnected with their
problems. Those few people who tried to use them
failed to solve
their problems within the required constraints.
DF
> If we want uptake, we have to move beyond the
simplified syntax of
> triples and the simplified DL languages, imho.
The W3C made the mistake of starting with syntax.
That mistake can't
be corrected by just moving to a different syntax.
I would focus on the huge backlog of legacy systems
and people with
legacy skills. If you consider their skills obsolete,
you'll fail.
But if you consider them a valuable resource, you have
a chance to
succeed beyond your wildest dreams.
PC
> I believe that most or all of your concerns can
be addressed by using a
> common primitives-based foundation ontology
(PIFO)...
As I've said for years, I am not against the idea of
using primitives,
but that is just one among many academic proposals.
The major question
is how do you enable people with their current skills
(possibly with
a short course) to use the tools successfully to solve
their problems.
KI
> RDF as a moniker is an unfortunate conflation of:
>
> 1. Data Model - EAV enhanced with URIs plus
explicit semantics for
> typed literals and language tags .
>
> 2. A number of data representation syntaxes and
across-the-wire
> serialization formats.
>
> With the above in mind, there is not broken
genealogy re. LISP and
> other critical pieces of this innovation
continuum re. structured data
> representation. Thus, we have to try to speak in
clearer terms about RDF.
Those are useful comments about the underlying
technology. But my main
complaint about the SW is not about Tim B-L's vision
in 1994. I liked
the vision from the beginning. My major complaint is
that the vision
was never connected with any problems that anybody
needed to solve.
Tim's major success was the WWW -- which is in the
same category as
the iPhone, Google, and Facebook as successful from
Day 1. He was
working as an engineer who had to solve the customer's
problem
(enabling physicists to share research papers) within
the constraints
of budget, deadline, and resources. He finished it in
one year with
a few assistants. And it worked.
For the SW, the W3C had no clue about what problem
they were solving,
how they would solve it, or what kind of budget,
deadline, or resources
they would need. But they wanted to do something, so
they started
at the *worst* possible level: syntax.
KI
> a significant number of folks will still
interpret [RDF] as a statement
> about RDF/XML syntax rather than an exploitation
of the RDF Data Model.
Both the syntax and the data model were premature
optimizations that
should never have been considered until *after* the
W3C had some idea
of what problem they were trying to solve.
Leo
> It [naming scheme] really depends on both the
tools and the ontology
> developers’ knowledge of English. And of course
it helps if you eventually
> have vocabularies you can map to that.
I don't disagree. But that is still syntax.
And the word 'eventually' implies "no
deadline". No serious engineering
project has a deadline of eventually.
DE
> So what's the purpose/value/utility of the
ontology view?
>
> If grunts are working away with their local
vocabularies/jargon/local
> opaque language (& VERY unlikely to be aware
of the ontology in the background),
> what is the value add of the ontology?
That is a good question. But you can only answer a
question about value
in terms of problems that are solved better, faster,
or cheaper.
Recommendation: Instead of proposing yet another
syntax, data model,
semantic theory, or super algorithm, I suggest we
focus on *problems*
that people actually need to solve -- and *how*
ontology could help
solve them within a reasonable time frame.
To be precise, I define "reasonable" as the
time to develop the iPhone
and make it work successfully with the current
infrastructure.
John
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