Ed, (01)
Much of this disagreement is caused by the delays of email.
In a face-to-face discussion, minor points are quickly resolved,
but in email, they can get dragged out in email about issues
on which there is no real disagreement. (02)
> IT standards bodies, John, are no longer about standardizing common
> practices in industry, if they ever were. The purpose of some of them
> is to enable a research technology to be used under industrial rules;
> the purpose of others is to prevent certain large firms from controlling
> a market with a proprietary de facto standard, especially when it is
> a hyped but shaky technology. (03)
Of course. I would've instantly agreed if we were talking directly. (04)
> Finally, the purpose of some 'research standards' is to prevent the
> production of 5 such standards for essentially the same thing. (05)
Things like that aren't research. They're variations of well understood
technology. The kind of research I was talking about is the kind where
there are no working implementations -- not even prototypes. (06)
> would that aptly characterize RDF, OWL, SPARQL and Common Logic
> when they were standardized? And perhaps SQL as well? (07)
RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and CL were variants of things that had been
implemented many times over during the past 40 years. I wouldn't
consider any of them to be research. SQL was novel, but it had
been implemented by IBM and Oracle before it was submitted as
a standard. (08)
JFS
>> But we have *zero* examples of independently developed systems of these
>> four kinds that have successfully extracted their implicit ontology
>> and shared it a form that could be used by the others. (09)
EB
> Who is "we"? As my father-in-law used to say, I wouldn't want to mention
> any names, but their initials are "TopQuadrant" and "CambridgeSoftware"
> and "Thematix"... (010)
This is another misunderstanding that wouldn't occur if we had been
talking in the same room. The 2012 API4KB slides looked as if they were
touching on research areas for which there are *ZERO* implementations
of any kind. But you're citing companies that have implemented
technology that I would classify as "routine" -- not research. (011)
I tried to click on the URLs for more detail about API4KB beyond the
2012 and 2013 slides. But I was blocked by their stupid passwords. (012)
But from what you're saying, I suspect that what API4KB is doing would
not even have been necessary if the W3C had made a rational decision
back in 2003. That is when Hayes & Guha presented the LBase semantics
for RDF and OWL. What H & G wrote was *exactly* consistent with
Tim B-L's proposal for SWeLL (Semantic Web Logic Language). Pat chose
a subset of the CL model theory as the foundation for LBase. (013)
If the W3C had voted to accept LBase in 2003, the SW would have had
ten years of experience in developing and using APIs that relate
all the SW languages to all the dialects of CL. (014)
John (015)
PS: Following is a copy of the note I sent in response to Elisa.
As it shows, I was thinking that API4KB was attempting to address
something much more complex. (016)
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] API4KB and diverse ontologies
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2013 09:38:02 -0400
From: John F Sowa (017)
Elisa, (018)
Thanks for the info about ongoing prototypes, etc. (019)
> [the front page does not] cover planned, joint activities with the
> OntoIOP folks. We learned last week in Berlin that there are clearly
> areas of synergy, and that some of the work on both projects might
> be accelerated via joint effort between OntoIOP and API4KBs. (020)
Anything that talks about sharing knowledge will have to have some
foundation in logic. The Ontoiop folks have already implemented
logic-based tools for doing certain kinds of sharing. I'm glad that
those groups are talking with each other. (021)
But there have been many projects for doing logic-based things for
a long time. In 1976, my first published paper on CGs was influenced
by AI work on semantic networks and DB work on the conceptual schema: (022)
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/cg1976.pdf
Conceptual Graphs for a Database Interface (023)
The ANSI/SPARC Conceptual Schema effort was intended to produce
a standard, but it ended as a technical report in 1978. An ISO
effort ended in another TR in 1987. In 1991, I got involved
in another ISO effort that ended in a TR in 1999. (024)
In 1991, I got involved with the Shared Reusable Knowledge Base (SRKB)
project. That effort led to KIF, KQML, and a collaboration between me,
Mike Genesereth, and a few others to develop ANSI & ISO standards that
eventually led to the ISO Common Logic standard in 2007. Those are
useful results, but more is needed. (025)
Then there was the DARPA BAA for the DAML project. Jim Hendler
was the Project Manager at DARPA who got that effort underway,
and following are his slides from 2000: (026)
http://archive.darpa.mil/DARPATech2000/Presentations/iso_pdf/6HendlerABCB&W.pdf (027)
As an early part of that effort, there was a "Feasibility Demo:
Heterogeneous Systems Interoperability Challenge". That is the
title of Jim's slide 18: (028)
JH
> 21 different agent systems and services integrated in 2 weeks
> Distributed development
> 9+ organizations/sites
> Six implementation languages
> Java, Lisp, C++, Prolog, Soar, C
> Multiple platforms
> Windows NT, UNIX Solaris
> Three Agent Communication Languages
> e.g., OAA ICL, KQML, FIPA AC (029)
This sounds like a very impressive demo. The ability to integrate
those diverse systems in *2 weeks* is even more impressive. That
DARPA BAA funded the DAML project with Tim Berners-Lee as the PI,
which produced the basic tools for the Semantic Web in 2005. (030)
Unfortunately, those tools -- RDF, OWL, and SPARQL -- cannot even
begin to do what Jim's slide claims was done in 2000. (031)
In his note on this thread, Ed Barkmeyer said
> So let's not cut the sapling down just because we know that it is
> not possible for it to bear the watermelons (032)
I don't want to cut down any saplings, but huge numbers of saplings
have been planted over the past 35 years. Many of them, as shown
by Jim's slides, had a lot of promise. (033)
In fact, I'm more impressed by Jim's slides from 2000 than by
anything I've seen from API4KB. But with hindsight, we know
that the demo is very different from what was produced. (034)
John (035)
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