Dear John, dear Ontologgers, (01)
the below message requires my reply. Apologies for the delay -- I have
only been made aware of this message recently. (Also, this is going to
be a new thread; I don't have the original email to reply to). (02)
I will try to keep this short. Your wider discussion about DAML, SPARQL,
SQL, Logic, the Semantic Web and Everything is not something I can
settle. Let me just clarify the role of SMW and the particular usage
website that this thread used to be about. Replies are inline. (03)
> From: John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 10 October 2012 19:41
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] [SMW-devel] [News] Google, Microsoft,
> Facebook And Others Launch SMW site
> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
> On 10/10/2012 7:54 AM, Peter Yim wrote:
>> YES! ... Thank you for relaying this very exciting news, Markus.
>
> Yes, indeed. Note the opening two sentences from the announcement:
>
>
http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/08/google-microsoft-facebook-and-others-launch-web-platform-docs-a-web-standards-documentation-site/
>> A number of leading browser vendors and other tech companies,
>> including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Adobe, Facebook, HP, Nokia,
>> Mozilla, Opera and the W3C, just announced the launch of the
>> Web Platform Docs project at WebPlatform.org. The project aims
>> to create “a new, authoritative open web standards documentation site”
>
> Note that the W3C is mentioned, but only after the list of vendors.
> The video on that page includes an endorsement by Tim Berners-Lee,
> but the groups with money are listed first. That is a clue to the
> future developments. (04)
I would not give so much weight to a news item about a new website. The
text I cited is from Techcrunch, an independent news portal. As far as I
know it is not an official press release. The quote is from someone at
Opera. (05)
>
> The software foundation is Media Wiki (developed by and for Wikipedia)
> with the extensions for Semantic Media Wiki plus PHP and MySQL:
>
> http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Special:Version
>
> The semantics is based on "templates", not on logic:
>
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Forms
>
> For a brief summary, see the 2-page Quick Reference Guide:
>
> http://postable.net/smwqr/smw-quick-reference.pdf
>
> Following are the property types:
>
> Page (default), String, Text, Code, Number, Date, Boolean, URL,
> Email, Telephone number, Temperature, Geographical coordinates
>
> Following is a sample definition on a page called "United States":
>
> {{#set_internal:Is president of|Has name=James Madison
> |Has start year=1801|Has end year=1809|Has vice
> president#list=George Clinton, Elbridge Gerry}}
>
> Note that their basic data structure is a typed list (AKA N-tuple)
> with the option of nested lists. (06)
There are a number of confusions here that I would like to clarify. (07)
(1) The above reference guide is not from the creators of SMW nor does
it allow any guess about their intentions. It is a technical cheat-sheet
that some users found useful. Nevertheless, it might be useful to take
such user views into account when arguing for or against certain features. (08)
(2) You refer to Semantic Forms (SF) for arguing about the importance of
templates in SMW. However, SF is an extension package built on top of
SMW to provide user interfaces for data input. It is important to
understand the difference between user interface (HTML), data management
(databases), and data model (ontologies). Mixing up random user
documentation found on the Web will not yield insights here. (09)
(3) The "sample definition" you give is based on another extension
package to SMW, called "Semantic Internal Objects" (SIO). If you want to
learn about the data model of SMW, I recommend more basic features for a
start. SIO provides a complex shortcut syntax that may be confusing at
first; it certainly is not self-explaining. Technically, SIO creates an
auxiliary object and set of facts (triples) that relate it to other
entities (specified by data values and wiki pages). (010)
At its core, SMW is a collaborative content management system for
semi-structured data. It is not an ontology editor or a reasoner,
although some people have used it in combination with such tools. (011)
There are different tools for different use cases. In the given case,
Microsoft, Google, et al. needed a content management system. This does
not imply that they think that only content management systems should be
used in the future. If I add a Common Logic export to SMW tomorrow, this
won't mean that Microsoft suddenly endorses CL just because they run
this site. There is absolutely nothing to conclude here regarding the
general status of the Semantic Web -- other than maybe the fact that
certain semantic technologies have become commodity tools for solving
menial practical problems such as running a web site. (012)
>
> This doesn't mean that the SemWeb is dead. (013)
+1 (014)
> But it does mean that
> the 2-page quick reference for the Semantic Media Wiki is a better
> clue to the future of the SemWeb than any of the layer cakes. (015)
I fully agree with this. I also think that the 2-page guide is almost no
clue for the future of the SemWeb at all. These two sentences are
consistent. (016)
>
> The absence of any mention of logic or ontology in their announcement
> means that the SMW developers don't see a need for it -- yet. (017)
Not at all. As I explained, it is not "our announcement" in the first
place. At least I (as a not insignificant part of "the SMW developers")
am working with logic and ontologies on a daily basis, both in theory
and in practice. No need to convince me of their utility; I have
practitioners telling me that already. (018)
> But
> their use of MySQL, N-tuples, and typed N-tuples indicates that a
> logic and ontology that can support them would be highly desirable. (019)
We do not use N-tuples or typed N-tuples. SQL is a background technology
used for primary storage in MediaWiki. The data/ontology model of SMW is
not based on SQL, neither in terms of data structures nor in terms of
datatypes or query language. (020)
Cheers, (021)
Markus (022)
--
Dr. Markus Kroetzsch
Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
Room 306, Parks Road, OX1 3QD Oxford, United Kingdom
+44 (0)1865 283529 http://korrekt.org/ (023)
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