Re: ANN: Mozillation project update

Cool! Thanks for the update. Wrapping RDF APIs around an inference system
(and which in turn wraps other data sources) is an interesting recipe.

This looks like a good environment to explore the issue of 'simple
graph API' versus 'full blown query language with variables etc' which
came up again recently in RDF IG discussions. The API you've got is mostly
of the former type, but with capability to add rules into the RDF
datasource. It doesn't look like it'd be that hard to add additional
methods for fancier querying.

SWI-Prolog's ability to talk to ODBC/SQL data sources is also pretty
interesting in this context (PrologSQL home
page: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Bit/1116/PrologSQL.html ),
regardless of the Mozilla angle. I've been experimenting with XSB (another
inference system that can talk ODBC) as a testbed for doing RDBMS to RDF
mapping. I'll clean up my notes and post them sometime.

So (putting on AI skeptic hat ;-) what I'd love to have now is a set of
practical use case scenarios which show all this logic stuff making itself
useful for real applications (maybe I can annoy the inference/KR folks on
this list into building some more cool demos to shut me up!).

The Mozillation demo shows some simple class hierarchy stuff (fido is a
mammal because fido is a dog etc), which is great for dog fans... But how
about working through an example based on, say, an RDF-based P3P decision
support system? The P3P mapping into RDF is stuff in flux, as I understand
it, but I think it would be a useful exercise to see what such an
application might look like in an RDF/logic environment. How might the
logic/rules stuff be used to model personal information preferences, to
answer queries based on the policies associated with web sites etc..?

Dan

ps. P3P info at http://www.w3.org/RDF/
RDF model is at http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P/#Appendix_RDF
feedback to the P3P folks about their RDF appendix would be good

On Sat, 8 Apr 2000, Geoff Chappell wrote:

> I've updated the Mozillation project  (http://209.198.94.130/mzpl) to
> support the latest build of Mozilla (also the Netscape 6 release).
> 
> The Mozillation project wraps a logic engine (SWI Prolog) as a Mozilla
> XP-COM component to allow client-side inferences to be made from RDF
> statements.
> 
> See the Enabling Inference (http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/inference.html)
> page on mozilla.org for more information.
> 
> - Geoff Chappell
>

Received on Saturday, 8 April 2000 16:20:15 UTC