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 A�t-Kaci, Vancouver, Canada (014)
References (015)
1. A�t-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. A�t-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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hak.vcf
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