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Re: [ontolog-forum] (SLIGHTLY OFF TOPIC) So you want to be a Data Scient

To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: "Hassan Aït-Kaci" <hassanaitkaci@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 18:22:54 -0800
Message-id: <50DE53FE.8010608@xxxxxxx>
On 12/28/2012 3:03 PM, John F Sowa wrote:
 > The main difference is that they Big Data people know how to talk to
 > IT professionals and their managers.  Meanwhile, the SW hype machine
 > focuses on academic pursuits that have no connection with reality.
 > Their biggest blunder was to make decidability their primary slogan.    (01)

On 12/28/2012 4:13 PM, Duane Nickull wrote:
 > First, while I consider "Big Data" term mostly a buzzword <SNIP/>
 >
 > DN: You'll get a kick out of my rant against the term along with Web
 > 2.0, NoSQL etc.    What the hell is big data?  Are my 1's and 0's
 > larger than normal?  ROTFL!
 >
 > Full read:
 > 
http://technoracle.blogspot.ca/2012/12/rabbit-turds-why-i-dislike-nosql-and.html    (02)

HAK's (CDN) $0.02:    (03)

I fully and heartfully concur with JS & DN on all counts - both on the 
topic they decry and their cited arguments, as well as in the 
frustration they feel and share. This discpline of ours (CS) has been 
plagued with hyping for a long time. But lately, it seems that the 
hyping has reached hysteria levels. So, since we're sharing our rants 
when it comes to gullibility vs. rational sanity in R&D, I would like to 
share a couple of my own, which I had made public earlier on my FB blog. 
I am reproducing them both below along with an illustration summing it 
all up nicely (since I am no longer an FB user due to that being yet 
another entrapment ... but this is another story).    (04)

Wishing all of you a Happy New Year,    (05)

-hak    (06)

------------------------------------------------------------------------    (07)

Children's Magic Won't Deliver the Semantic Web
Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 7:33pm ·    (08)

LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Communications of the ACM
Vol. 52 No. 3, Pages 8-9, March 2009
10.1145/1467247.1467250
http://mags.acm.org/communications/200903/?folio=8&CFID=82583774&CFTOKEN=93000187#pg10    (09)

To explain the nature of "Ontologies and the Semantic Web" in his 
contributed article (Dec. 2008), Ian Horrocks, a leading figure behind 
the theory and practice of Description Logics (DLs), employed analogous 
characters and language of the fictional Harry Potter children's novels. 
Notwithstanding the fact this did not help readers not already familiar 
with Potter or even those, as there may exist a few, who find the novels 
utterly boring and repetitive, hearing the same story over again in a 
new guise prompts me to ask: When will such presentations evolve from 
toy examples into more realistic accounts of larger, complex ontologies? 
That is, when will the important issue of scalability in the storage, 
retrieval, and use of large ontologies (millions of concepts, hundreds 
of millions of roles/attributes, nontrivial reasoning) be addressed?    (010)

Horrocks wrote, "A key feature of OWL is its basis in Description 
Logics, a family of logic-based knowledge-representation formalisms that 
are descendants of Semantic Networks and KL-ONE but that have a formal 
semantics based on first-order logic." While this may be true, it could 
also mislead a neophyte to conclude that DL is somehow the only 
formalism for representing and using ontologies. This is far from true. 
There is at least one alternative formalism, also a direct descendant of 
KL-ONE—Order-Sorted Feature (OSF) constraint logic [1]—that lends itself 
quite well to the task. Elsewhere, I also covered how various DLs and 
OSF constraint logics formally relate to one another [2].    (011)

The trouble I see in such publications by influential members of the 
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is that one particular formalism—DL—is 
being confused with the general issue of formal representation and use 
of ontologies. It would be like saying Prolog and SLD-Resolution is the 
only way to do Logic Programming. To some extent, the LP community's 
insistence on clinging to this "exclusive method" has contributed to the 
relative disinterest in LP following its development in the 1980s and 
1990s. Similarly, DL formalists have built a de facto exclusive 
reasoning method—Analytic Tableaux—into their formalism so the same 
causes always result in the same consequences.    (012)

Whether the various languages proposed by the W3C are able to fly beyond 
toy applications has yet to be proved, especially in light of the huge 
financial investment being poured into the semantic Web. To realize this 
promise, we must not mistake the tools for the goal. Indeed, while DLs 
are admittedly one tool among several for representing and using 
ontologies, the goal is still to make semantic Web ontology languages 
work, no matter which method is used, as long as it is formal, 
effective, and efficient on real data. Otherwise, the semantic Web might 
well end up being built on nothing more than children's magic.    (013)

Hassan Aït-Kaci, Vancouver, Canada    (014)

References    (015)

1. Aït-Kaci, H. Data models as constraint systems: A key to the semantic 
Web. Constraint Programming Letters 1 (Nov. 2007), 33–88.
http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/pvh/CPL/Papers/v1/hak.pdf    (016)

2. Aït-Kaci, H. Description logic vs. order-sorted feature logic. In 
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Description Logics. 
Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag, 2007.
http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-250/paper_2.pdf    (017)

------------------------------------------------------------------------    (018)

Reinvention of the Square Wheel
March 6, 2010 at 1:14pm ·    (019)

Ok let me at it...
I am sick and tired of witnessing the reinvention of the square wheel by 
uneducated bozos who take undeserved credit for making ox carts be able 
to travel.
Periodically, after years of quiet, and generally ignored, research by 
educated (and generally humble) scientists inventing perfectly smooth 
and circular wheels, there would be some marketing hype pointing out the 
genial findings of some obscure backyard "innovator" lacking basic 
scientific training, but having a knack for effective communication. 
These findings would be, you have guessed it, the invention of a square 
wheel for ox carts.
The "new" invention would then revolutionize all the media pointing out 
the geometric beauty and mathematical simplicity of the square, with the 
added benefit of not needing brakes on the cart. They would also point 
out the inherent difficulty of the "Frame Problem" of Ox Cart 
Engineering---that of making a cart wheel roll smoothly. Mind you, they 
would not say "of making a square wheel roll..." No, of course! This is 
because they and the overwhelming majority, following the hype, would 
automatically understand that the most avanced of all cart wheel designs 
is the square one.
But what about the "quiet" geeks that know all about the circular wheel?
Indeed, wouldn't normally constituted scientists spontaneously rise to 
claim the ridiculousness of the "new'" hyped invention and put that 
pathetic parody of science to rest?
Well, not so sure...
For one, the hypers would then have the advantage of being now the 
"standard" technology due to outrageous amounts of research funding from 
the government (mostly military) and the private sector (also military 
subcontractors). If anyone knows scientific researchers, they quickly 
realize that the great majority of them are underfunded poor geeks that 
go from writing one research-funding proposal to another, most of them 
being denied. Hence, being smart to recognize the smell of dough, many 
would immediately and unabashedly switch to working on the "frame 
problem" of Ox Cart Engineering. The few that would still remain puzzled 
with the ineptitude of the whole situation, and may timidly point out 
that a circular wheel would work better than a square one, would then 
have no chance to be heard, let alone understood. They would be casually 
dismissed as romantic odd balls stuck in the previous century. Their 
papers on circular wheels would be flatly rejected at all major 
international (square-wheeled funded) Ox-Cart conferences with sneering 
comments from the referees pointing out the fact that circular wheels 
have been known to be inherently flawed---because they need brakes!... 
Indeed, the square wheel obviouly makes an ox-cart more stable than a 
circular wheel, and therefore is a superior technology.
The sad thing is that even a square wheel that cannot roll will! With 
brute force and persistence and years of lavish funding (while ignoring 
anyone proposing a circular wheel) until it eventually becomes, first a 
hexagonal wheel, then an octagonal wheel, and finally a more-or-less 
ovoid wobbly wheel. The fact that it took years to get to what was 
obviously the best (and existing!) design to start with is forgotten. 
Even sadder is the fact that the re-inventors of the square wheel 
shamelessly take full credit for the (more or less oval) wheel they 
eventually obtain as their own design after painstakingly dragging their 
square-wheeled carts for many years. Their argument : they succeeded 
solving the "circling of the square" problem thanks to the years of 
"research" they spent improving on the original revolutionary square 
wheel design.
This state of affairs has resulted in producing many square wheels, each 
being then "optimized" for many years by thousands of well-funded 
"researchers" until wear and tear makes them eventually boil down to 
roughly oval wheels, pale versions of the very simple basic Computer 
Science notions they are uselessly complicating.
Meanwhile, thousands of papers "optimizing" this square wheel are being 
published, and the names of all the square-wheels re-discoverers are now 
famous---when all they did was to propose a square wheel that eventually 
got smoothed into an oval wheel after years of "hard thinking."
The remaining bobbling effect this provokes on ox carts is simply part 
of the fun of traveling. And the nausea it may cause is now being 
actively worked on by new well-funded Ox-Cart Nausea researchers.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Anyways, as Kurt Vonnegut would write: "And so it goes!..."    (020)

-hak
-- 
http://www.hassan-ait-kaci.net/contactme.html    (021)

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