Re: [ontology-summit] Migration path to controlled natural language tool

[Gary Berg-Cross <gbergcross@xxxxxxxxx>]

Part of John Sowa's talk on the Track A Reuse topic involved better divisions of labor in knowledge engineering. So for building a Knowledge-based system here recommends:

● Acquire knowledge from structured data, training examples, 

 unstructured natural language, and occasional questions.

● Communicate in their preferred notations and diagrams.

● Contact a KE only to report problems or to request new features.

As part of a migration path John recommended  better development methodologies supported by controlled  natural languages can be used effectively by nonprogrammers.

In our session we didn't have time to pursue these ideas as much as I would have liked and

in particular quite a while ago (2004) John has provided some material on "Common Logic Controlled English" that provides a number of examples of this type of CNL based knowledge acquisition that still seems beyond what we do and our tools support.  

I think it would be great to take a few steps in that direction and perhaps John can help do that for the Symposium topic summaries.  This crosses the areas or tools and bottlenecks as well as reuse.

Gary Berg-Cross, Ph.D.  

gbergcross@xxxxxxxxx     

http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?GaryBergCross

NSF INTEROP Project  

http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0955816

SOCoP Executive Secretary

Knowledge Strategies    

Potomac, MD

240-426-0770

On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 11:11 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Andrea, Jack, and Gary,

I agree that a very underspecified definition can cover the many
senses of a word.  But it adds very little information.

AW
> How about the following for our basic definitions:
> * Reusable - "Capable of being used again" (from WordNet)
> This begs the question of what makes semantic content
> "capable" of being used again.

As you said, it doesn't answer the question.  It relates the word
'reuse' to the word 'use', which has very little meaning in itself.
If I say "I used X", that means I performed some action in which X was
involved as a tool, a resource, a part, etc.  That doesn't say much.

If I say "I reused X", it says even less.  I can reuse a DVD disk
as a coaster for my coffee cup.  That's similar to Jack's example
of reusing an article of clothing.

AW
> * Interoperability - "Ability of systems or organizations to work
> together" (from Wikipedia)

That's another underspecified definition.  Computer systems have
been interoperating from the earliest days.  Whenever some human
carried a deck of punched cards from computer A and loaded it in
the card reader of computer B, the two computers interoperated.
A high-speed line can make the interoperation faster, but there's
no difference in principle.

AW
> There was a thread on the public-lod mail list that specifically
> asked for this, "Evaluation of ontology reuse choices in real-world
> scenarios" (Feb 20).  Unfortunately, there were no specific answers.

That's the critical point.  Scenarios and case-histories get into
the details.  It's too bad that there were no specific answers in
that case.  I suspect that the many different partial answers were
so diverse that it was hard to find useful generalizations.

GBC
>>  Haven't we made progress on understanding several areas of semantic
>> relations that can be reused?  Distinctions among different types
>> of Part relations come to mind and are post-Aristotle.

I didn't summarize all the discoveries of the Sumerians, Egyptians,
Chinese, Indians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Indians, medieval Scholastics,
Renaissance, etc.  Aristotle most certainly did analyze the many kinds
of part relations.  As I said, Wilkins' ontology (17th c) was as good
or better than many ontologies on the WWW.

Roget's Thesaurus (19th c) is still widely used -- and it has a better
coverage of adjectives and adverbs than WordNet.  I suggest that you
compare the two.  Take any sample of words (nouns, verbs, adjectives,
and adverbs) and look at the "concept neighborhoods" linked to them
in both Roget's and WordNet.  It's very easy to compare them:

  1. For Roget's, take any word and type it into the following demo:
     http://www.ketlab.org.uk/roget.html

  2. For WordNet, type the same word to
     http://www.ketlab.org.uk/wordnet.html

You might start with the verb 'explore'.  Then compare 'happy' and
'happiness' on both systems.  For software and documentation about FCA
(Formal Concept Analysis), see http://www.upriss.org.uk/fca/fca.html

AW
> I agree that we do have common semantics already that need to be
> highlighted - part, dependency, generalization/specialization, events...

Yes, but...  There is a huge difference between the kinds of detailed,
very precise ontologies needed for designing an airplane and the looser
ontologies needed for answering a Jeopardy question.  LOD is somewhere
closer to Jeopardy than to airplane design.

AW
> All of these semantics need more than just a definition and encoding
> in RDF or OWL.  They need the backing tooling, metadata and repository
> that we have highlighted.

I certainly agree with the first sentence.  On the second, I believe
that current research is just scratching the surface of what needs
to be done.

John

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