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

At 8:20 PM -0500 9/29/03, pat hayes wrote:
><x-flowed>
>>   > -----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...
>>>
>>
>>   >
>>>   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
>
>Why do you need one? Just USE THOSE TERMS in your
>document. That's all you need to do. Then
>anyone/thing reading your document will find them
>,and they will direct him/her/it to NCI, where it
>will find some stuff which it can use in drawing
>conclusions.  If you don't use any of the fast
>food vocabulary and there isnt any inference path
>from what you have used to it, then it won't get
>used (or at any rate, not because of anything you
>have said.)
>


well that is what I approve of - a sort of "follow your nose" - but 
when I said there is no mechanism for this, I meant in the sense that 
I haven't seen something specified that makes it clear which things 
are in an "inference path" and which things aren't -- that said, I'm 
personally fine with this...


[snip]

>>
>>>   3 - I'm looking for a way to mark up some instance data, and I have a
>>>   database of information about genetic loci - I see that the NCI
>>>   ontology has a list of these loci (MYC, PVT, etc) so in my document I
>>>   define some properties of the nci:locus class and assert my
>>>   information -- this seems valuable to me because I figure other
>>>   people will decide if they like the NCI ontology, and if they do
>>>   maybe they'll find my data and properties useful.  (This is a real
>>>   situation we're trying to encourage some large genetic DB providers
>>>   to buy into) - the user also may find some other cancer ontologies
>>>   and define some properties on the terms from that as well..
>>>        Difference in this case from 2 is that this user is
>>>   trying to add
>>>   their own information to be used with some ontology, and doesn't
>>>   really care what is in the parent ontology other than some particular
>>>   class they want to use - perhaps the same mechanism could be used as
>>>   in 2, but might be a lot of extra work over just using a URI
>>>   reference   (This is my personal favorite for what a URI reference
>>>   without an imports statement should do)
>
>Well, it can't ensure that others will use your
>stuff, presumably: but I agree this seems
>sensible and again, you don't need to do anything
>SW-special: if others start using your URIs then
>there is an access path back from their use to
>your SubCLass assertion to the NCI origin for the
>superclass.
>
>All of this seems to be what might be called
>normal-usage on the SW. Ontologies use terms
>originating in other ontologies, using the normal
>Web linking to provide the traces back for users,
>so that inference engines can hopefully find
>relevant content. To the extent that the links
>aren't broken and the SW-markup composers have
>their act together (failure in both of which will
>be rapidly detectable), this will probably work
>reasonably well with the current 'design'  or at
>any rate the emerging best-practice. I take it
>that our current goal here is to articulate this
>best-practice vision as concisely and
>'reasonably' as possible without treading on
>anyone's methodological toes.

I think you and I are in total agreement here (Scary, ain't it)

>
>>   >
>>>
>>>   In essence, I like Tim's idea of a protocol, and that somehow it is
>>>   between the user and the definer of the URI, but I'm worried that if
>>>   it becomes transitive (i.e. protocol gets B to understand A, gets C
>>>   to understand B, gets D to understand C, ...) we cannot distinguish
>>>   the cases above, or worse, we end up with an everything imports
>>>   everything type situation (I recently created a version of part of
>>>   the NCI ontology that includes a reference to something in CYC and to
>>   > something in WordNet -- my document contains about 20 lines, but if
>>>   you have to bring in all those things to "understand" it, you get
>>>   well over a million triples -- this strikes me as a problem)
>>
>>As I say, this is the very thing that distinguishes the current efforts
>>from dozens or hundreds of reasoning systems that have been built before
>>it.  So I agree, but I would qualify and say it is a *research*
>>problem.
>
>I think we can do better than that. Imports
>needn't be understood as 'now you must copy the
>transitive closure here before proceeding'. A
>much better way to interpret it would be
>something like 'this ontology is intended to be
>read while supposing that  ontology is true', ie
>that this ontology gives you, the reader, an
>explicit licence to draw any conclusions from the
>imported ontology as well as, and together with,
>it, the importing ontology. Not, of course, that
>you actually *need* that licence, since you are
>free to draw any conclusions that you feel like
>drawing from whatever sources you, in your
>wisdom, decide to trust for whatever purposes
>suit you best.  But (a) the importing ontology is
>trying to be helpful and (b) the endorsement
>links may add up a kind of SW-googlizable subWeb
>if there are enough of them, which I guess
>everyone hopes is going to happen some day , and
>(c) if your inference screws up, your lawyers may
>be able to put some of the blame on me even if
>the cause of the screwup is in the imported
>ontology; so I have, by taking this risk,
>exhibited some reason why if you trust me, you
>maybe should also trust that.

three for three...

-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  *** 240-277-3388 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler      *** NOTE CHANGED CELL NUMBER ***

Received on Monday, 29 September 2003 21:47:18 UTC