Re: "Microsoft Access" for RDF?

Yes,  there is the general project of capturing 100% of critical
information in documents and that is a wider problem than the large amount
of Linked Data which is basically RelationalDatabase++.

Note that a lot of data in this world is in spreadsheets (like relational
tables but often less discipline) and in formats like XML and JSON that are
object-relational in the sense that a column can contain either a list or
set of rows.

Even before we tackle the problem of representing the meaning of written
language (particularly when it comes to policies,  standards documents,
 regulations,  etc. as opposed to Finnegan's Wake or "Mary had a little
lamb") there is the slightly easier problem of understanding all the
semi-structured data out there.

Frankly I think the Bible gets things all wrong at the very beginning with
"In the beginning there was the word..." because in the beginning we were
animals and then we developed the language instinct,  which is probably a
derangement in our ability to reason about uncertainty which reduces the
sample space for learning grammar.

Often people suggest that animals are morally inferior to humans and I
think the bible has a point where in some level we screw it up,  because
animals don't do the destructive behaviors that seem so characteristic of
our species and that are often tied up with our ability to use language to
construct contafactuals such as the very idea that there is some book that
has all the answers because once somebody does that,  somebody else can
write a different book and say the same thing and then bam your are living
after the postmodern heat death,  even a few thousand years before the
greeks.

(Put simply:  you will find that horses,  goats,  cows,  dogs,  cats and
other domesticated animals consistently express pleasure when you come to
feed them,  which reinforces their feeding.  A human child might bitch that
they aren't getting what they want,  which does not reinforce parental
feeding behavior.  Call it moral or social reasoning or whatever but when
it comes to maximizing one's utility function,  animals do a good job of
it.  The only reason I'm afraid to help an injured raccoon is that it might
have rabies.)

Maybe the logical problems you get as you try to model language have
something to do with human nature,  but the language instinct is a
peripheral of an animal and it can't be modeled without modeling the animal.

There is a huge literature of first order logic,  temporal logic,  modal
logic and other systems that capture more of what is in language and the
question of what comes after "RDF" is interesting;  the ISO Common Logic
idea that we go back to the predicate calculus and just let people make
statements with arity >2 in a way that expands RDF is great,  but we really
need ISO Common Logic* based on what we know now.  Also there is no
conceptual problem in introducing arity > 2 in SPARQL so we should just do
it -- why convert relational database tables to triples and add the
complexity when we can just treat them as tuples under the SPARQL algebra?

Anyway there is a big way to go in this direction and I have thought about
it deeply because I have stared into the commercialization valley of death
for so long,  but I think an RDF editor for "Linked Data as we know it"
which is more animal in it's nature than human is tractable and useful and
maybe a step towards the next thing.






On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 6:28 PM, Gannon Dick <gannon_dick@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi Paul,
>
> I'm detecting a snippy disturbance in the Linked Open Data Force :)
>
> The text edit problem resides in the nature of SQL type queries vs. SPARQL
> type queries.  It's not in the data exactly, but rather in the processing
> (name:value pairs).  To obtain RDF from data in columns you want to do a
> parity shift rather than a polarity shift.
>
> Given the statement:
>
> "Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun"
>
> (parity shift) Australians are "Down Under" Englishmen and just as crazy.
> (polarity shift) Australians are negative Englishmen, differently crazy.
>
> Mad Dogs ? Well, that's another Subject.
>
> The point is, editing triples is not really any easier than editing
> columns, but it sometimes looks dangerously easy.
>
> -Gannon
>
> [1]  'Air and water are good, and the people are devout enough, but the
> food is very bad,' Kim growled; 'and we walk as though we were mad--or
> English. It freezes at night, too.'
> --  Kim by "Rudyard Kipling" (Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)), Chapter
> XIII, Copyright 1900,1901
> --------------------------------------------
> On Wed, 2/18/15, Paul Houle <ontology2@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  Subject: "Microsoft Access" for RDF?
>  To: "Linked Data community" <public-lod@w3.org>
>  Date: Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 2:08 PM
>
>  I am looking at some
>  cases where I have databases that are similar to Dbpedia and
>  Freebase in character,  sometimes that big (ok,  those
>  particular databases),   sometimes smaller.  Right now
>  there are no blank nodes,  perhaps there are things like
>  the "compound value types" from Freebase which are
>  sorta like blank nodes but they have names,
>  Sometimes I want to manually edit a few
>  records.  Perhaps I want to delete a triple or add a few
>  triples (possibly introducing a new subject.)
>  It seems to me there could be some kind of system
>  which points at a SPARQL protocol endpoint (so I can keep my
>  data in my favorite triple store) and given an RDFS or OWL
>  schema,  automatically generates the forms so I can easily
>  edit the data.
>  Is there something out there?
>
>  --
>  Paul Houle
>  Expert on Freebase, DBpedia, Hadoop and RDF
>  (607) 539 6254    paul.houle on Skype   ontology2@gmail.comhttp://
> legalentityidentifier.info/lei/lookup
>
>


-- 
Paul Houle
Expert on Freebase, DBpedia, Hadoop and RDF
(607) 539 6254    paul.houle on Skype   ontology2@gmail.com
http://legalentityidentifier.info/lei/lookup