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Re: [ontology-summit] The tools are not the problem (yet)

To: Ontology Summit 2014 discussion <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: John McClure <jmcclure@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 21:01:40 -0800
Message-id: <52DF50B4.4090902@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Hi John-
Thanks for the level headed reply in the face of the weak sarcasm in my last communique - please accept my apology for that! It's clearer to me now there are two groups of folks here, what one might call the FOL crew, and the other the RDF crew.

This latest exchange perhaps could not be a better example of the problem here, or maybe it's just my problem. When I said 'reuse' was the promise yet to be delivered, I didn't stop to consider that FOL'ers couldn't give a tinkerer's damn about reuse because FOL'ers tend to view themselves as pure consumers, end-nodes, data scientists. However RDF'ers do not; their projects are front-line operational systems using the tools that, by your OWN account, John, originated because those used by FOL'ers were "too complex for most people".

I appreciated the links you included -- you're always a source of fabulous information -- because the more closely I've looked at them, I see that FOL'ers predicates are, indeed, verbs and prepositions, just what I have been saying needs to be done -- must be done -- by the RDF'ers if we're ever to get to a higher plane of ontology reuse. In other words, I expect FOL'ers like yourself to be among the most ardent supporters in absolutely rejecting the crappy noun-oriented predicates (like &p3p;purposeOptIn) that now poisons the RDF'ers world. And poisons the working relationship between FOL'ers and RDF'ers, as you so very clearly indicate when you thinly say
If somebody gives them data in that format, the first thing they do is to convert it to a more usable form
Well, "that format" is what the RDF'ers produce. What is recommended by the W3, that's we produce. How can FOL'ers not be implicitly derisive of the work RDF'ers are diligently about, when the first reaction is to THROW IT AWAY?

Accordingly I believe that Ontolog's 2014 communique should be extremely clear: the current W3 RDF methodology for property specification is fatally flawed and must be aligned with FOL'ers requirements.

regards/jmc

On 1/21/2014 6:44 PM, John F Sowa wrote:
On 1/21/2014 6:15 PM, John McClure wrote:
how do I answer questions such as recently asked re a Privacy Ontology:

  why start from scratch when others already have spent much time to
  create distinctions? P3P 1.1:http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P11/

"Reuse" was the promise; empirically it has not been delivered - why not?
The fatal flaw was the confusion of reuse with the idea that all details
have to be represented in the same notation at the same level.

The packet switching of TCP/IP is the level where the bits and bytes
of a file are assembled in packets and sent across the wires or waves.
That was the level to address privacy (and thwart "packet sniffing").
But when Arpanet was designed in the late 1960s, privacy issues were
poorly understood.

When Tim B-L and his group implemented http on top of the Internet
and combined it with SGML, their goal was to make research papers
on physics freely available to researchers around the world.
Privacy was not a requirement.

JFS
If somebody gives them [advanced AI systems] data in RDF format,
the first thing they do is to convert it to a more usable form.
JM
Oh, what form is that, please. CycL?
CycL was, in fact, the basis for RDF.  R. V. Guha, who worked with
Tim Bray to specify RDF, had been the associate director of the Cyc
project.  He realized the CycL was too complex for most people, and
he wanted to specify a simple, but usable subset.

Guha had many years of experience in using LISP for implementing
CycL, and he wanted to use a LISP-based notation for RDF. However,
the W3C was trying to promote XML, and they made the mistake of
voting to use XML for everything.  That is another horrible
example of design by committee.

JM
And what happens to "reuse" in this process?
There had been 40 years of using LISP for the most advanced AI
projects, and 0 years of using *ML languages for anything other
than annotating and formatting documents.  During those 40 years,
programs, data, and ontologies had been circulated in punched cards,
tapes, disks, and networks among researchers around the world.

The saddest part of the story is that Guha and Bray were working
at Netscape when they defined RDF.  At that time, Netscape had
developed JSON (_javascript_ Object Notation) -- which was basically
LISP notation with brackets and curly braces.  If they had adopted
JSON as the notation, they could have had Schema.org in 1999.

John
 
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