Re: Nonmonotonic rules

Pat --

How about Heflin's Local Closed World paper [1] ?

It gets the best of both worlds (:-) , particularly if you combine it with 
English-like rules as in the Internet Business Logic system [2].

The rules can conclude things like "assuming that nothing has changed on 
this list of URIs, the answer to your question is..."    One can also get 
an explanation, showing any LCW assumptions made in getting the answer.

Hope this helps.           -- Adrian

[1] http://www.cse.lehigh.edu/~heflin/

[2] www.reengineeringllc.com


At 02:29 PM 1/15/04 -0600, you wrote:

>Re. the (forever ongoing and interminable) debate about the merits of 
>otherwise of nonmon reasoning.
>
>Bottom line: nonmon reasoning is brittle (by definition) but can be very 
>efficient. So when you know it won't break, by all means use it. But it 
>seems to me that it is up to its proponents to justify or explain how we 
>can have nonmon formalisms being used in a Webbish context, where the 
>brittleness (or if you prefer, context-sensitivity) seems on the face of 
>it to be an unsurmountable barrier to deployment, since there is no way 
>for a reader of some nonmon rules to know what the intended context is; 
>and when used out of context, nonmon rules are almost always wrong, and 
>can produce potentially dangerous errors. (Note, this is only referring to 
>the *publication* of nonmon rules on a Web, not to their *use* in some 
>application where it is known they are appropriate, or one is willing to 
>take the risk of using them in any case.)
>
>So far, the only response Ive heard on this point is a kind of blustery 
>denial: a claim that the Sweb just isn't going to be like the WWWeb, but 
>more like an intranet, where all the users will just know, or will be told 
>by the owner, or will agree among themselves in managers' meetings, which 
>worlds are closed and which namespaces satisfy the unique-names assumption 
>and so on; so the problem will be avoided by what might be called 
>Web-external contextual agreements. I refuse to take this answer 
>seriously: it seems to me to just be a statement to the effect that one is 
>not working on the semantic web at all.
>
>Anyone got any other answers? Until someone has, I would suggest that all 
>talk about nonmon systems be ruled out of order.  Its not enough to 
>observe in a general kind of way that nonmon systems are useful (no 
>argument) or that they are in widespread use and all the best companies 
>have them and they make a lot of money (irrelevant) or that they solve 
>this or that famous problem (they usually don't, in any case). There is a 
>basic technical issue that needs to be addressed. Address it, or else 
>please shut up about them.
>
>Pat
>
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Received on Thursday, 15 January 2004 17:09:25 UTC