Integrating Disparate Information Systems

On 11/9/10 10:23 AM, John F. Sowa wrote:

John,

Great response.  I am cc'ing in LOD mailing as your comments are 
poignant re. systems integration and the need to separate Logic from 
Syntax etc..

Others: I encourage you to read on, and digest.

> On 11/9/2010 1:24 AM, Alex Shkotin wrote:
>> What do we need for our information systems to communicate properly?
>> Integration? Alignment? Unification? Information system education?
> The first point I'd emphasize is that IT systems have been successfully
> communicating for over a century.  Originally by punched cards, then
> by paper tape, magnetic tape, direct connection, and telephone.
>
> When Arpanet was started in 1969, there had been a long history
> of experience in data communication.  And the latest conventions
> for the WWW are still based on extensions to those protocols.
>
> Those physical formats and layouts are very important for the
> technology.  And they will remain buried in systems for ages
> upon ages.
>
> But you never, ever want those formats to have the slightest
> influence on the semantics.  The decision to force OWL into the
> same straitjacket as RDF was hopelessly misguided. In fact, even
> the decision to force decidability down the throats of every
> ontologist was another profoundly misguided technology-driven
> decision.  (Note the subtle semantic distinction between profound
> and merely hopeless.)
>
>> What kind of language and dictionary we need to write question? SPARQL?
>> What kind of language  and dictionary we need to write answer? XML, CSV?
> Use whatever notation is appropriate for your application.  But you
> must design the overall system in such a way that the choice for one
> application is *invisible* to anybody who is designing or using some
> other application.
>
> Of course, there may be some cases where real-time constraints make it
> necessary to avoid a conversion routine between two systems.  But that
> is a very low-level optimization that should never affect the semantics.
> For example, when was the last time that you thought about the packet
> transmissions for your applications?  Some system programmers worry
> about those things a lot.  But they're invisible at the semantic level.
>
>> Where is your SPARQL end point at least?
> When you are thinking about semantics, any thought about the
> difference between SPARQL, SQL, or some bit-level access to data
> is totally irrelevant.  Please remember that commercial DB systems
> provide all those ways of accessing the data if some programmer
> who works down at the bit level needs them.  But anybody who is
> working on semantics should never think about them (except in
> those very rare cases when they go down to the subbasement to
> talk with system programmers about real-time constraints.)
>
>> JS: "but every application will have... different vocabularies, and different
>> dialects." Inside. But with a stranger we usually change language to common.
> Not necessarily.  Sometimes you learn their language, they learn
> your language, or you bring a translator with you.
>
> But it's essential to distinguish three kinds of languages:
> natural languages, computer languages, and logic.
>
> For NLs, translation is never exact because they all have hidden
> ontology buried down in their lowest levels.  For computer languages,
> the level of exactness depends on the amount of buried ontology.
>
> Some computer systems (such as the TCP/IP protocols) do translation
> from strings to packets very fast because they don't impose any
> constraints on the ontology.  Therefore, programmers above the
> lowest system levels never think about those translations.
>
> For other systems, such as poorly designed software, the ontology
> changes in subtle ways with every release and patch to any system.
> (I won't name any names, but we've seen such things all too often.)
>
> But first order logic was *discovered* independently by Frege and
> Peirce 130 years ago, and *exact* translation between their notations
> and all the modern notations for FOL is guaranteed.
>
> Note the word 'discover'.  Frege and Peirce did not *invent* FOL.
> My comment is that FOL was standardized by an authority that is
> even higher than ISO -- namely, God.  (Please note the Bible,
> John 1,1:  "In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was
> with God, and God was the logos.")
>
> Nobody has to learn FOL, because it's buried inside their native
> language, whatever it may be.  But some notations for FOL are less
> readable than others.  That's why I recommend controlled NLs for
> many purposes.
>
> But learning to write FOL is nontrivial, even in a controlled NL.
> The reason for the difficulty is that people are used to the
> flexibility of their native languages with all that built-in
> ontology.  To write pure FOL requires a very strict discipline
> to distinguish the logic from the implicit ontology.
>
> Bottom line:  The distinction between logic and ontology is so
> important that you should never confuse people with extraneous
> issues about bit strings, angle brackets, or even decidability.
>
> John
>
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>


-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
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Received on Tuesday, 9 November 2010 16:39:33 UTC