John, (01)
Your rather brief retelling of the history indicates that you were not
around in the early days of electronic publishing. But since you were at
IBM you might have some insights into the publishing standards. (02)
In crafting SGML Charles Goldfarb undoubtedly must have run into what I
call "the Von Neuman problem". That is, when you start turning math into
something usable then you find that pieces are missing that prevent the
application from working. In Von Neuman's case he had to add fetch,
store, rotate, go and gosub to the instruction set to have all the
instructions to create a program. (03)
Clearly SGML is built on FOL and perhaps Church's calculus, it also
borrows from linguistics, including the rules for extensibility. Charles
didn't go to much length in explaining why it included what it did. And
it is difficult to read. But, IBM is in the business of explaining what,
not of explaining why. I believe that is why Tim & Tim decided to use a
subset of SGML applications for XML. Let me point out that Tim used the
SGML application tag set from the AAP when he selected the tags for XML. (04)
So, my question is this. What do you see that was added to the SGML
standard that was beyond the scope of FOL? Is there anyone at IBM that
can reflect on this? (05)
-John Bottoms
FirstStar Systems
Concord, MA (06)
On 3/17/2012 9:45 AM, John F. Sowa wrote:
> Paul,
>
> I love the WWW and all the wondrous things it has supported.
>
> I love URIs as they have been defined by the WWW and the way
> that they are upward compatible with all the unique identifiers
> that anybody and everybody else has defined.
>
> I love the vision of the Semantic Web that Tim Berners-Lee presented
> in his original talk to the W3C in 1994 and in his book that came out
> a few years later.
>
> I also love the wealth of R& D on semantic systems from 1950 to 2000.
> That includes AI, computational linguistics, DB conceptual schema,
> logic programming, deductive databases, software specification,
> software engineering, and related areas of computer science.
>
> But I am disappointed by two things: (1) the tiny amount of the R& D
> on semantic systems that has gone into the Semantic Web, and (2) the
> glacially slooooow rate of acceptance of the SW tools.
>
> PT
>> It requires people to think, observe, analyze, experiment, test,
>> and rework. All activities that are well supported by SW technologies
>> and ready-to-hand mainstream IT tools.
> Please note what R. V. Guha, the *inventor* of RDF, said in the Ontolog
> seminar he presented in 2011: "Somehow RDF never took off."
>
> Guha was working as an associate director at Cyc, which was and still
> is the largest AI knowledge base on the planet. But he realized that
> the Cyc language (CycL) was too complicated for most people, and he
> wanted to develop something simpler. He left Cyc and went to Apple,
> where he developed a notation based on triples as the predecessor
> to RDF. But Apple didn't see any use for it. So he left Apple and
> went to Netscape where he collaborated with Tim Bray to develop RDF.
>
> RDF didn't help Netscape stay in business. Nokia poured millions
> of euros into R& D on the SW, but Apple beat them with the iPhone,
> which doesn't use any SW technology.
>
> After Guha left Netscape, he went to IBM Research, when IBM management
> thought that the SW looked promising. But instead of building their
> natural language software on top of the SW, IBM used XML to develop
> a more efficient represenation called UIMA, which they used to build
> the Watson system for answering Jeopardy questions.
>
> Then Guha went to Google, where he has been working on schema.org
> and the Google software as an alternative to the SW tools.
>
> I haven't given up on Tim B-L's vision, but after 18 years, it's
> time to rethink the strategy for implementing it. I suggest that
> the W3C take a hard look at what Apple, IBM, and Google did.
>
> John
>
> PS: I still have a bunch of IBM stock that I accumulated in my 30
> years at IBM. It more than doubled in value in the past 5 years,
> despite a big dip in 2008. That's not bad, but Google went up
> by more than 3.6 times, and Apple went up by a factor of 6.
>
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