Re: Cross-ontologies reasoning

At 18:08 -0500 12/19/03, Drew McDermott wrote:
>[Cross-posting to try to move this discussion away from the Semantic
>Web Services mailing list.  Granted it's relevant, but its true scope
>is wider.]
>
>    [Frank McCabe]
>    The 'problem' I was referring to was that of automatically mapping one
>    ontology (written I assume by person or persons A) to another (written
>    by persons B).
>
>    People have asserted that there exist automatic tools for doing that.
>    And I was pointing out some corner cases.
>
>People are kidding themselves.  Not to offend their fans, but the
>results on automatic ontology mapping using probabilistic methods,
>machine-learning techniques, graph isomorphism, word repetition,
>etc. etc. are publishable and will make some of us into academic
>stars, but they won't actually begin to solve the problem.  The
>problem is AI-complete.  It's like Richard Waldinger's solution to the
>automatic-programming problem: A. Create an intelligent robot.
>B. Give it a Lisp manual to read.
>
>
>--
>                                    -- Drew McDermott
>                                       Yale Computer Science Department


Drew,. I agree completely if we use your definition of 
ontology-merging.  Partial mappings have a greater
success (particularly allowing heuristic mechanisms), and of course 
there's no reason we can't have some human in the loop.  Also, none 
of the literature I know allows instances to be mapped against 
multiple ontologies, which is a new idea that occurs easily on the 
Semantic Web, and which opens many opportunities for new research.
  So I guess I'm kidding myself
  -JH


-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
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)

Received on Friday, 26 December 2003 12:07:00 UTC