RE: imports and commitment - troubled by today's call...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Black [mailto:JohnBlack@deltek.com]
> Sent: Saturday, September 27, 2003 7:49 AM
> To: Jim Hendler; public-sw-meaning@w3.org
> Subject: RE: imports and commitment - troubled by today's call...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jim Hendler [mailto:hendler@cs.umd.edu]
> > Sent: Friday, September 26, 2003 5:00 PM
> > To: public-sw-meaning@w3.org
> > Subject: imports and commitment - troubled by today's call...
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Sorry I could stay to end of phone call today -- there were 
> a couple 
> > of things being discussed I'd like to have followed up on -- one in 
> > particular is bothering me
> > 
> > It has to do with imports vs. commitment to what something claims. 
> > Tim said that he viewed owl:imports as more or less a "#include" 
> > mechanism, and I agree.  However, if referring to a URI on another 
> > page is also like a "#include" then I think we break the 
> Semantic Web 
> > -- that is, the "imports closure" of a SW document could 
> conceivably 
> > end up being a major portion of the whole semantic web if we are 
> > successful and end up with lots of things pointing at each other 
> > (which is certainly my vision of the SW, and I think also Tim's)
> > 
> 
> I think this closure of context is essential.  I don't think it will
> break the Semantic Web, I think it will *make* the semantic web.  
> Without this closure of context this project could become a YARS, 
> yet-another-reasoning-system.  One thing that distinguishes the 
> current effort is that statements are embeded in the context of the 
> web.  Now if I had to constantly compute this closure on my laptop, 
> that would be impossible.  Similarly Pat warns in 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-sw-meaning/2003Sep/
> 0139.html,
> "...*any* adult human being brings to bear an incredibly rich 
> context of meaning and interpretation to any linguistic act. There 
> is no hope of having software do anything remotely like this in the 
> forseeable future;..."  I disagree. I think we will use huge engines 
> running at places like Google to compute these closures.  I just 
> searched the Web for the phrase, "semantic network".  According to 
> this search application, I reviewed about 3,307,998,701 pages.  Of 
> these, this search engine located about 26,400 pages in 0.12 
> seconds.  
I agree that at least some computation should take place at places like
Google, but I'm skeptical about how much review really takes place when
Google claims to have reviewed 3,307,998,701 pages. I don't know all that
much about the details of the Google engine, maybe someone else could
expound, but isn't this "review" a lot more restricted in scope than the
kind of computation necessary in the imports closure operation?

> > 2 - I look at the NCI ontology and examine a small portion 
> of it.  I 
> > think that part is good (the part on oncogenes), but I'm not sure 
> > about the whole document (which contains stuff about lifestyles, 
> > about fast food restarants, and lots of other things) -- I 
> might like 
> > my document to say that I use certain terms from that document, but 
> > am not willing to "commit" to the others (I don't say I 
> disagree with 
> > the others, just that I'm not willing to buy in)
> >     I haven't seen any mechanism to do this, although at one point 
> > Bijan suggested a mechanism in which the owl:ontology 
> statement could 
> > include a set of URIs from that or other documents and give them a 
> > name together.  This was roundly rejected by Peter and Ian, among 
> > others, but I still think it had merit (esp in light of the 
> > discussion on this list)

As an alternative, rather than viewing owl:imports as the #include
mechanism, suppose we view it more like the java import statement, where we
are simply state "the name 'someFoo' is the one defined by the full name
com.xyz.someFoo", sort of an on-demand basis. This way, you only agree to
the definition of the terms you use.

It would be convenient to have the ability to carve out chunks of an
ontology with a single owl:imports, sort of a subpackage mechanism, like
Ada, not java.

Just a thought.

James

Strategic Coordination - Enterprise Standards
HP Software Services
610 595 4995

Received on Monday, 29 September 2003 10:36:19 UTC