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Re: [ontology-summit] [Applications] Launching the conversation about La

To: Ontology Summit 2012 discussion <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Jack Ring <jring7@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2012 11:42:00 -0700
Message-id: <85FFEF06-D6BC-4262-AE52-8F13E33B20AC@xxxxxxxxx>
Glad I don't appear in either. Means irrelevant rather than insignificant.
On Jan 22, 2012, at 11:22 AM, John F. Sowa wrote:    (01)

> Jack, Deb, Mills, Joe, and Toby,
> 
> This thread spans the range from the sublime to the ridiculous.
> 
> The sublime:
> 
> JP
>> ... the boundary that separates machines from organisms.
>> 
>> That boundary is the same one that frequently emerges in conversations
>> that pit "reductionism" against holistic thinking.
> 
> DM
>> That plus what should be processed by machines versus thought through by 
>people
> 
> MD
>> Integral Ecology — Uniting Perspectives on the Natural World,
>> an 800-page tour-de-force by Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman.
>> My sense is that there is a breakthrough waiting to happen here.
> 
> The ridiculous:
> 
> DM
>> I think we need to encode the standard hierarchy (from world
>> to a bolt on a piece of equipment) in RDF plus OWL.
> 
> I agree with everything up to the last three words.
> 
> If the Semantic Webbers had done their duty a dozen years ago, we
> wouldn't need all the preaching about how useful ontology could be.
> But instead of focusing on semantics, they got bogged down in syntax.
> 
> The major web companies -- Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Amazon --
> have rejected RDF and OWL.  They'll accept input in RDF, but they
> don't generate it, use it, or recommend it.  If I were investing
> my own money, I would not bet on RDF + OWL.
> 
> DM
>> I have a couple sample problems but want to get "the idealized
>> existing universe" in perspective first. For example, more precision
>> is needed for location from lat/long to navigating a floor (aka storey)
>> to a room, to a piece of equipment or sensor - then back out again
>> to the block, neighborhood, state with corresponding application domains
>> similar to places and spaces mapping science maps
> 
> You can represent simple data in triples, but OWL is too weak to do
> the kind of reasoning required to support the above requirements.
> 
> If you look at the overwhelming majority of OWL ontologies on the web,
> you'll find that they don't use anything beyond Aristotle.  The biggest
> difference is that Aristotle's notation was much better -- for both
> people *and* computers.
> 
> JSON is much more widely used than RDF because it has more structure,
> better typing, and a notation that is far more efficient for computers
> and far more readable for humans.  Any JSON triples can be extended
> to n-tuples, they can have optional typing, they can be nested at any
> depth to form lists, and they have a simple mapping to most programming
> languages and most notations for first-order logic.  JSON is also used
> and recommended by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! -- they have more 
> power, more money, and more experience than the W3C. I'll bet on them.
> 
> MD
>> Who is it that thinks that separate formalisms and tooling for semantic
>> web description logic, procedurally sequenced process models, and
>> aggregations of business rules provide an adequate conceptual framework
>> for, let alone a practical methodological foundation for
>> architecture/engineering/construction?
> 
> I strongly agree with the implications of that rhetorical question.
> Among them is the need for common semantics.
> 
> Commercial compilers became available in the mid 1950s.  By the mid
> 1960s, compiler technology was mature.  Today, we have commercial and
> open-source compilers that can take multiple programming languages as
> input and generate multiple machine languages as output.
> 
> GCC, for example, can compile 7 programming languages as standard and
> another 8 or 9, but not in the standard version.  For output, GCC can
> generate machine code for 20 major architectures, another 23 less
> popular architectures, and 20 more that are processed by specialized
> versions of GCC.
> 
> Furthermore, anybody who designs a new programming language or
> a new machine architecture (hardware or virtual) can modify the
> GCC source code to support it.
> 
> This means that syntax is a *solved problem* -- any and every syntax
> that anybody finds useful (including RDF + OWL) can and should be
> supported.  But every syntax has a different "sweet spot".  It is
> foolish to force everybody to use the same syntax for all purposes.
> 
> Joe S
>> Formal concept analysis (FCA) may then be directly applied.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_concept_analysis
>> 
>> There are aspects of formal concept analysis and lattice theory
>> that may be applied across an wide range of topics using relations
>> as one guiding filter.
> 
> I strongly agree.  FCA is a semantic technology that is independent
> of any notation.  It has been used successfully in conjunction with
> RDF and OWL.  But it has also been used with a wide variety of other
> notations, logics, and programming languages.
> 
> FCA avoids getting bogged down in battles about syntax.  It is not
> rich enough to support all requirements for reasoning, but it
> supports a large subset of OWL by *automatically* generating the
> hierarchy of concepts (AKA classes) without requiring somebody
> to do the detailed coding in OWL.  I'll bet on FCA.
> 
> The critical issue is semantics.  For GCC, the semantics is defined
> by an abstract machine.  All source languages are compiled to an
> Interlingua that corresponds to that machine.  All target languages
> are generated from that Interlingua.
> 
> For logic, the ISO 24707 standard for Common Logic was designed as
> an Interlingua.  DoD funded the IKRIS project, which recommended
> one additional feature to CL for the IKL language.  The IKRIS
> project also demonstrated that IKL could serve as an Interlingua
> among several very rich knowledge representation languages,
> including CycL, which is the language used for the biggest formal
> ontology ever implemented and used.
> 
> RDF and OWL are small subsets of Common Logic, with some built-in
> ontology that is easy to define in CL.  JSON, predicate calculus,
> and many other common notations are also simple subsets.
> 
> But I am *not* claiming that CL or IKL is an absolute requirement.
> What I am saying is that a common semantics is required.  If anybody
> finds or defines a semantics that is better suited than CL or IKL,
> I would be delighted to support it.
> 
> The first priority is a common semantics.  The second priority
> is to evaluate proposals.  CL is an example.  The IKRIS committee
> recommended CL with one extension for IKL.  If anybody has a better
> suggestion -- either a replacement or a modification to CL or IKL
> -- then we should consider it.
> 
> TC
>> There are efforts underway to standardize the application of
>> ws-calendar schedules to mission functions (i.e. material
>> in the Program phase) to understand not just how much energy
>> will be required, but when.
> 
> That's a typical application.  And most application domains have
> traditional notations that the users and developers prefer.  It
> is counterproductive to force people to shoe-horn their preferred
> notations to something like RDF and OWL.  Instead, their notations
> should be compiled directly to the common semantics.
> 
> The Cyc project has over 27 years of experience in translating
> input from a wide variety of different notations to CycL.  That
> experience is valuable, and most of it is documented in white
> papers on the cyc.com web site.  We should take advantage of it.
> 
> I would also recommend the dissertation by Tara Athan, who used
> the IKL semantics to support knowledge interchange with the
> Geography Markup Language (GML).  See the abstract below.
> 
> John
> __________________________________________________________________
> 
> Source:
> http://ruleml.org/papers/AthanDissertation/AthanGISDissertation2011.pdf
> 
> XCLX: An XML-based Common Logic eXtension
> with Embedded Geography Markup Language
> 
> Mary E. Athan
> 
> A novel eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based Common Logic eXtension,
> called XCLX, is presented. The novel syntax draws from the standard
> syntaxes Common Logic Interchange Format (CLIF) and eXtended Common
> Logic Markup Language (XCL), as well as Rule Markup Language (RuleML),
> Interoperable Knowledge representation Language (IKL), IKRIS Context
> Language (ICL), and XML Inclusions (XInclude). In addition, the syntax
> is open to user extensions, including embedding elements from foreign
> namespaces as names, functions and atomic sentences, and has a meta-
> language for self-extensibility. These features allow Common Logic to
> embed structured data, such as Geography Markup Language (GML), while
> maintaining a well-defined semantics.  The overall syntax is defined
> by a modular schema, using a design pattern developed for RuleML.
> The XCLX semantics is defined either by formal mappings into equivalent
> syntactic forms (in XCLX or foreign dialects, including CLIF, IKL,
> ICL), or axiomatically through the meta-language. The semantics of
> the meta-language is novel and is stated directly. A number of
> illustrative examples, drawn from geography and GML, are presented.
> 
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