- From: Chris Yocum <cyocum@gmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2022 10:52:51 +0100
- To: semantic-web@w3.org
- Message-ID: <YtKKc7+GsO8s6fVq@belldandy>
Dear Semantic Web Community, I have written on this list before about my project but I wanted to bring up a particular problem that I have with reasoners that will require some background explanation before I can describe the problem. My project encodes some of the most important genealogies of medieval Ireland in RDF (git repo: https://github.com/cyocum/irish-gen, blog: https://cyocum.github.io/). Because I am often the only person working on this, I use reasoners to extrapolate the often implicit information in the data. This saves me much time and I only need to translate exactly what is in the source material. I have discussed some of the problems that I have encountered a few years ago (https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2018Dec/0088.html). I do not want to bring that back up but if someone is interested in any of those problems, please feel free to email me and I would happily discuss some of them with you. When I discuss some of the benefits of using a reasoner to some of my Humanities based colleagues, one of the many things that come up is: how do I check that the reasoner has reasoned through this correctly? Essentially, this is about accountability. "Computer says so" does not carry much weight. If I cannot justify why a reasoner has made a certain choice when inferring predicates, some of the force of the system is lost. Additionally, if I run a SPARQL query and the result that is returned is not what I had expected, having a "meta-query" of the reasoner can help me find bugs in my own data that I can track down and fix. I do understand that I can always go back to the original source material and try to track down the error that way but it would something like this would make it much easier in situations where the material is still in manuscript form and difficult to decipher. Additionally, this is a trust problem. People who do not work with computers at this level do not feel that they are in control and this raises their defences and prompts questions of this kind. To sum up, my questions are: * Does something like this make sense? * Does something like this already exist and I have not noticed it? * Are there other ways of doing something like this without needing more code? * Is this something that is technically possible for reasoners? I assume so but getting expert advice is usually a good idea. * If the first two questions are in the negative: is there anyone in the community working on something like this that I could collaborate with? Even if it is just in a UAT style where I run my dataset and send back any funny results. Thank you for reading and thanks in advance. All the best, Christopher Yocum
Received on Saturday, 16 July 2022 09:53:07 UTC