Re: Cross-ontologies reasoning

On Thursday, December 11, 2003, at 05:00 PM, Francis McCabe wrote:

> Ehem
>   Notwithstanding the technologies being discussed, *translation* 
> between ontologies is about as tractable in the general case as 
> mapping between English and Japanese.

Depends on what you mean by general case, of course. But I don't think 
Jack and I were misleading on this front.

I mean, the simplest reading of "reading across ontology" compatible 
with all that Jack wrote is fairly trivial (i.e., reasoning across 
concept heirarchies partial defined in many files owned by diverse, 
non-coordinated authors; of course, such reasoning may often be 
uninteresting).

>  However, an approach based on translating queries is, in principle, 
> more doable than arbitrary mapping.

Care to articulate the difference that makes the difference in your 
eyes?

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.

Received on Thursday, 11 December 2003 17:43:03 UTC