I agree with Steve. Language discussions are important, of course, but
we should put special care in separating content discussions from
language discussions. Since we have already a cross-cutting track on
ontology quality, and ontology quality strictly depends (among other
things, of course) on the language used, I wonder whether we could
confine language discussions to the ontology quality track, with
pointers to the other tracks. (01)
Best, (02)
Nicola (03)
On 23/gen/2012, at 04:24, "Steve Ray (CMU)" <steve.ray@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: (04)
> This is all good stuff, and I agree with John, but I fear we are slipping
>into general language discussions rather than talking about use cases for
>large systems in various domains.
>
> However, all this will of course also be captured.
>
> - Steve
>
> On Jan 22, 2012, at 10:22 AM, "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> 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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