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Re: Fwd: [uos-convene] Essential or Not

To: Bill Andersen <andersen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Upper Ontology Summit convention <uos-convene@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 14:12:30 EST
Message-id: <4409e69e.420b.0@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Bill,    (01)

Just two points:    (02)

1. Immaturity is a relative term.  You can have technology that
   is sufficiently mature to be useful even though it is far
   from what we'd like to have in the long run.  As scientists,
   we have to take a long-term view.  As engineers, we have to
   solve the problems we face today.    (03)

2. That's the ideal way to use RDF and OWL (and I wouldn't hold
   my breath waiting for SWRL):    (04)

> We're bombarded daily with the "Why don't you use OWL?"  
> question.  We use a logic programming semantics at Ontology Works  
> because it's the only way we (or anyone else) knows of to do the  
> things we do fast enough to satisfy our customers -- database  
> product customers with LOTS of data.  Period.  Dot.  No OWL except  
> in an import/export mode because it just won't (even with the  
> proposed extensions in 1.1) do what we need [in terms of  
> expressiveness and query speed].  Maybe SWRL or some other rule  
> extension will help, but we're not holding our breath and meanwhile  
> we'll just keep on working.    (05)

At VivoMind, we tried to use the tools that were edicted for
RDF and OWL, and everything kept blowing up, running out of
space, etc., etc.  (I won't mention which tools were edicted.)    (06)

So we just implemented a trivial translator to Prolog and/or CL.
It's lightning fast, it works, and it doesn't fail.  For output,
we export to anything anybody asks for.    (07)

Bottom line:  Give the customers what they ask for, but don't
let them dictate what tools you use.    (08)

John    (09)

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