Re: Semantic web formalisms (was Re: Requirements for a possible "RDF 2.0")

On Jan 16, 2010, at 3:13 AM, Dan Brickley wrote:

> 2010/1/16 Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>:
>>
>> On Jan 15, 2010, at 4:21 PM, Jiří Procházka wrote:
>
>>> Look at FOAF for example... Undoubtedly there is demand for such
>>> lightweight semantics.
>
> Actually not lighter, just different. In FOAF we care about things
> like where the information came from, when it was true, which RDF
> properties can reasonably take different values later in time, etc.
> None of which is in OWL or RDFS.  Having such things would help us
> better document the meanings of the terms in FOAF, and perhaps do some
> automated sanity checking.

OK, this sounds like an answer to the question I posed in an earlier  
email. So, what do you think of trying to build some of this into the  
basic semantics of RDF? Truth is always relativized to a time/source,  
properties are more like dynamic processes than mere sets of tuples,  
etc.. At the very least, it would be in interesting exercise in seeing  
what happens to model theory when its being asked to take a dynamic  
logic seriously.
>
> Re formalising things like 'friend', ... well the idea of a standards
> committee sitting around a table debating the definition (in English
> or in a logic language) of "friend" always struck me as ridiculous,

Well, but people do do things like this. Writers of dictionaries,  
translators, and so on; not to mention sociologists. Why not try to  
take advantage of all their hard work?

> which is one of the reasons I always resisted requests to
> 'standardise' FOAF through somewhere like W3C.
>
> As an aside, there are some mappings to FOAF in Cyc now; see
> http://wiki.foaf-project.org/w/Cyc for details (or go to
> http://sw.opencyc.org/ and search for FOAF).
>
>> It relies upon the RDF (and bits of RDFS) semantics, though. Not of  
>> course
>> to DEFINE its meanings,
>
> From the start, I always tried to anchor FOAF in natural language
> categories and terms - as a documentation technique, I wouldn't use
> the word 'definition' for that either. For a long time, each class was
> defined as a subclass of one generated from Wordnet hypernyms
> (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/1999Dec/ 
> 0002.html
> and successors). That stuff is broken currently but we'll probably
> bring it back, again as documentation rather than definition.
>
> There is a paragraph in http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/ since the
> RDFCore revisions, which I'll still stand by:
>
>    """This specification does not attempt to enumerate all the
> possible forms of vocabulary description that are useful for
> representing the meaning of RDF classes and properties. Instead, the
> RDF vocabulary description strategy is to acknowledge that there are
> many techniques through which the meaning of classes and properties
> can be described. Richer vocabulary or 'ontology' languages such as
> DAML+OIL, W3C's [OWL] language, inference rule languages and other
> formalisms (for example temporal logics) will each contribute to our
> ability to capture meaningful generalizations about data in the Web.
> RDF vocabulary designers can create and deploy Semantic Web
> applications using the RDF vocabulary description language 1.0
> facilities, while exploring richer vocabulary description languages
> that share this general approach."""
>
> The original FOAF writeup - http://www.foaf-project.org/original-intro
> - described FOAF as a 'utility vocabulary', and we sketched some
> family tree terms like foaf:uncle which it would be tempting to try to
> formalise in a rule language. Ten years later, RIF is nearly finished,
> OWL2 is done, and we could probably define some cartoon structures
> that better capture things like "something is something else's uncle
> if [blah blah blah male blah sibling blah parent blah]". And to the
> extent those kinds of OWL2/RIF definitions shadow what real users of
> the Web want to say about themselves or their families, we can happily
> use any new RDF-based vocabulary technology to improve this
> documentation.  And I do expect we'll see much more use of OWL2 in a
> FOAF context in the coming months, particularly to describe groups of
> people picked out by adhoc characteristics.

I will bet that if gender terms are complicated, then "uncle" is off  
the walls. I think it means something like "Male older person who is  
to be treated with affection and respect at the level appropriate to a  
distant blood relative."

> *However* ... when we have these sorts of tool in our toolkit, it is
> very tempting and appealing to use them, over-use them, in situations
> where they don't really fit. And FOAF is right there as the canonical
> example. To a tidy-minded ontologist, it is tempting to define
> foaf:gender as an enumueration with 2 values; but doing so excludes
> thousands who don't feel comfortable picking from that short list. To
> a tidy-minded ontologist, it's natural to define 'foaf:father' and
> 'foaf:mother' as functional properties; excluding millions who might
> protest that their family history is a little more complicated than
> that.

Yes, Ive always noted that the functionality applies only to the DNA- 
biological senses of mum and dad, not familial ones.

> It is always possible to write a more complex - aka pedantic -
> ontology, to protest that we should be distinguishing
> foaf:biologicalParent from other forms of parenting, so that we can
> axiomatise the tidier parts. But doing so forces people to make
> descriptive distinctions that may well not care to make; sometimes
> that fuzzyness is there for good reason.

We can have both, thanks to the wonders of subPropertyOf.

>
> So when the FOAF stuff seems to lean towards the fuzzy, messy side of
> things, it isn't for lack of respect for the richness of the formal
> tools we have; just a concern that we don't over-apply  formality in
> areas it isn't needed.

I agree, and NEEDed is the important issue.

> If FOAF ever aquires family tree properties,
> they'll lean towards definitions that defer to the views of the
> parties involved; this is quite natural from a social perspective, but
> something akin to rocket science if we tried to capture it all
> formally.
>
> ( I have some fondness for
> http://geeks-bearing-gifts.com/gbgContents.html here, if it's not
> obvious)

>> ...                  but to support what little inference that  
>> engines
>> might need to draw; and they do: inverse functional properties for  
>> example
>> play a critical role in FOAF deployment.
>
> Yes. Actually what we really wanted was something like 'inverse
> functional static', since FOAF apps merge multiple descriptions of the
> same person, which might not ever have been simultaneously true. A
> page about me from 2004 and a page about me from 2010 could at
> authorship time both fairly ascribe me different ages. I can put all
> that quite happily into a SPARQL db, but I need to be careful when
> putting it into certain kinds of reasoner system. You can't merge both
> documents (and the schema) into a common set of triples without
> generating a contradiction; however you can reasonably expect
> computers to figure out that they are nevertheless both descriptions
> of the self-same person. Doing this by solely relying on the
> owl:InverseFunctionalProperty nature of foaf:homepage doesn't quite
> cut it; if a person can have different ages in different -
> contextually reasonable - descriptions, why can't different things
> have been the thing that had that homepage, at different times? In the
> absence of formal languages to describe this kind of real world
> practical mess, we get by with procedural code. Life goes on! But
> formally speaking, there are useful kinds of data merging we want to
> do over FOAF-based RDF documents which aren't sanctioned by owl:IFP.

Again, more interesting. Suppose we were to say that RDF graphs came  
with embedded dates, would that be enough information to do the clever  
data merging you want? Or would you need more? (What?)

>
>>> If it was to be defined by some descriptive
>>> language... to be frank, I can't imagine that - it would probably be
>>> some upper ontology stuff which is subject of many disagreements.
>>
>> Agreed, we don't need that. I'm all for lightweight ontologies. But  
>> they
>> still use the semantics of the formalism they are written in.
>
> They do. Reminds me to add a section to the FOAF spec declaring
> support for the real meaning of owl:sameAs; I've added mention of the
> other bits of OWL and RDFS we use -
> http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#sec-extrefs - , but forgot sameAs since it
> only appears in instance data, not in our RDFS/OWL file...
>
>>> That
>>> is why we shouldn't embrace one specific descriptive language as  
>>> main
>>> RDF formalism, we should be able to choose it, therefore defining  
>>> the
>>> level our ontologies can be reasoned about by machines.
>>
>> No, here you go off the rails. Look, RDF does not define the  
>> meanings of
>> FOAF, of course. But FOAF itself does use the formally defined (and  
>> very
>> weak) meanings of things like rdf:type and  
>> owl:inverseFunctionalProperty;
>> and it would actually break if these were arbitrary or not defined  
>> with some
>> precision.
>
> It's still reasonable to have various more (initially experimental)
> descriptive languages built over the RDF base. For example, one that
> dealt with provenance / sourcing of claims, temporal issues etc might
> be attractive in some contexts but overly-costly in others. In an
> ideal world these variations would all play well together, but I
> wouldn't hold my break.

Or my breath. However, I personally would hold my breath for an RDF  
with temporality in it, I think that is doable. Im not sure what the  
provenance machinery would look like, though. Got any examples of  
provenance reasoning? .

>
>>> As I understand it, you expect to teach your machine RDF, and be  
>>> able to "understand" whole semantic web.
>
> I don't think anyone seriously proposed this as a requirement for RDF
> or the W3C SemWeb specs. When we talk of machine understanding and
> (more often) partial understanding around here, it is pretty
> metaphorical. Generally, people handle the 'understand' bit, computers
> get the boring job of processing, merging, comparing, querying,
> transforming and not-screwing-up our data files. To call that
> 'understanding' risks getting us the reputation of being wide-eyed
> idealists who are trying to make the Web achieve full consciousness.
> I"d settle for making computers slightly less anoying and somewhat
> more useful in day to day information management tasks. On top of that
> modest end, there's a lot that can be achieved. Full machine
> understanding can wait for version 3... :)

Right, we need to get hold of the positronic neural processors first,  
then we can start on that part.

Pat

>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>

------------------------------------------------------------
IHMC                                     (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973
40 South Alcaniz St.           (850)202 4416   office
Pensacola                            (850)202 4440   fax
FL 32502                              (850)291 0667   mobile
phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us       http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes

Received on Monday, 18 January 2010 16:48:49 UTC