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Re: [ontolog-forum] Complexity, efficiency, and the user language (was P

To: Adrian Walker <adriandwalker@xxxxxxxxx>, "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 16:54:43 -0400
Message-id: <52702093.8070501@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Adrian and Kingsley,    (01)

I agree that the systems you designed implement the kinds of tools
that the DAML project should have adopted as their primary direction.    (02)

Versions of them were available when the DAML project started in 2000.
With the blessing of Tim B-L and DARPA, tools of that kind would have
been immediately adopted by mainstream IT.    (03)

AW
> there's a running system out there on the web that does pretty much
> just [what JFS recommends].  Not for *any* data organization, but
> it automatically generates and runs networked SQL that would be too
> complicated to write reliably by hand...
>
> A Wiki and SOA Endpoint for Apps written in Executable Open Vocabulary
> English over SQL and RDF.  Online at http://www.reengineeringllc.com
> Shared use is free, and there are no advertisements    (04)

Note:  Adrian and I were coauthors of _Knowledge Systems and Prolog_,
second edition 1990.  In Chapter 4, Adrian described an early version
of his system of Executable English and showed how to implement it in
Prolog.  He showed how to translate that notation to Prolog, how to
translate Prolog to SQL, and how to use them in a deductive database.    (05)

Another coauthor was Michael McCord, who implemented the English parser
and semantic interpreter that analyzed Jeopardy questions for Watson.
In Chapter 5 of the KS & P book, he described slot grammar and its
implementation in Prolog.    (06)

Those systems were implemented in the 1980s.  Other useful systems in
the 1990s provided a superset of the functionality of OWL and SPARQL.
They had better notations for the users, and they were better
integrated with mainstream IT than the tools from the DAML project.    (07)

KI
> SQL struggles with federation because Tables are local and DBMS
> engine specific...SQL identifiers are typically DBMS engine specific    (08)

You can put any data of any kind -- including IRIs -- in any field of
an RDB.  The SQL WHERE clause is fairly clean.  But the largest RDB
vendor did everything possible to make their system a "roach motel".    (09)

In any case, Datalog is a much cleaner notation that has a simple
mapping to SQL and to SPARQL.    (010)

KI
> the optimizations that you align re. SQL and Prolog apply equally to SPARQL.    (011)

I certainly agree.  I'm pleased that Google has been pushing JSON as
a general notation that can support both RDBs and RDF.    (012)

John    (013)

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