Re: telco this Friday, 15:00 (CET)

I'm also in favor of the strong linking approach. Machine-readability is the all point of having the SW. We should avoid informal links and, as Aldo said, allow for a a process of cumulative learning by usage, which of course is initially error-prone. 
In general, this also reflects my view of a Cognitive Semantic Web, where even if models are provided top-down, in principle they can be revised and adapted by agents for their own goals. Something I talked about last year at this ISWC workshop:  http://stko.geog.ucsb.edu/sw2022/

My two cents,

Alessandro
On Jul 19, 2013, at 8:36 AM, Aldo Gangemi wrote:

> Ciao Guido,
> 
> sent by aldo from a mobile
> 
> On 18/lug/2013, at 15:42, Guido Vetere <gvetere@it.ibm.com> wrote:
> 
>> Philipp, 
>> 
>> unfortunately (or fortunately) I'm leaving for my summer vacation this evening, and I won't be able to make the call tomorrow, I'll be reading mails occasionally in the following days. 
>> 
>> As for the main point: 
>> 
>> > 
>> > 1) Strong vs. weak linking
>> > 
>> > Guido has recommended that we do not create formal links to other 
>> > models, e.g. by equivalentClass or subClassOf axioms, but we use "weak" 
>> > and "informal" links through rdfs:comment and the like.
>> >  From a SW perspective, this approach is non-orthodox I think. The whole 
>> > SW is about formalization. Informal links can not be used by machines to 
>> > align datasets, do distributed querying etc. Informal links in this 
>> > sense are only documentation and for human inspection and reasoning. 
>> > This is exactly what the SW wants to avoid, i.e. that we always have to 
>> > appeal to intuition of people ;-)
>> > I do not have a very strong position on this issue, but if some of us 
>> > would still give a few cents for the SW idea, then we should go for a 
>> > more formal and thus stronger linking. Just my two cents.
>> > 
>> 
>> There's no room to start a discussion on the SW vision here, but let me point out that formally linking to existing ontologies means embracing all the commitments of those ontologies, which would require a careful and reasoned examination. If we want to design our model as a plain extension of existing ones, a complete analysis of all available proposals should be taken into consideration. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think this study is available already. I would suggest to keep links to external resources as informative for now, we could promote them to the rank of formal axioms once we understand all the onto-logical implications and agree on them.   
>> 
> 
> I'm afraid that this attitude goes against the exploitation of formal logic in the large. It'a hard to "understand all the onto-logical implications and agree on them." because those implications can only be evaluated empirically on the SW, which is open, dynamic, and used by all sorts of people. We may hope in a slow understanding and adaptation of formal principles, if they prove to be an advantage. In this process, we may discover which parts of formal semantics are most useful, what problems emerge, etc.
> And doing this means to allow people to make mistakes and even to generate deformations of the original assumptions. Quite in the way natural languages evolve :).
> In short, I support Philipp here.
> Ciao
> Aldo
> 
>> Hope that helps! 
>> 
>> Guido Vetere
>> Manager, Center for Advanced Studies IBM Italia
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Alessandro Oltramari
Research Associate
Psychology Department, Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh PA 15213
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"There’s no such thing as the unknown– only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.” (Capt. J.T. Kirk)
"To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself." (S. Kierkegaard)

Received on Friday, 19 July 2013 16:29:53 UTC