Re: OWL "Sydney Syntax", structured english

Hi Bijan --

Thanks for the wide sweep of your thoughts on the general issue of English,
tools, authorability and useability.

Thanks also for reminding me of the good discussion you and I had on this
subject more than a year ago.

One quick question please...  You mentioned

 2) someone reported using Swoop's NLP view for verification and even
correction by domain experts (that last part I don't understand quite
as we don't provide a parser)

I don't seem to be able to find this by Googling.  Do you have a pointer?

                                     Thanks in advance,  -- Adrian

Internet Business Logic
Online at www.reengineeringllc.com
                                Shared use is free
Adrian Walker
Reengineering
Phone: USA 860 830 2085



On 12/3/06, Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> On Dec 3, 2006, at 8:01 PM, Adrian Walker wrote:
>
> Sometime, I don't know when, since people in this thread
> have...interesting...quoting discipline, Kaarel Kaljurand wrote:
>
> >> I played with the Internet Business Logic. The idea is elegant.
> >> But is
> >> it useful?  Have you done studies showing that people prefer IBL
> >> to, say,  Prolog.
>
> The term "studies" in the above text seem to refer, most naturally,
> to controlled experiments, though, plausibly, it could refer to
> longitudinal or case studies, or perhaps user surveys.
>
> > Thanks for saying the idea is elegant.  Hopefully, studies such as
> > [1,2,3] are building evidence that it is also useful.
> [snip]
>
> The "studies" cited in this subsequent text do not seem to fall into
> any of the paradigms I mentioned. One could, perhaps, stretch, and
> call them case studies, though, as such, I do not find them
> especially illuminating. Perhaps it's best to call them "worked
> examples". The first (<www.reengineeringllc.com/
> Oil_Industry_Supply_Chain_by_Kowalski_and_Walker.pdf>) is perhaps
> more of a system description or white paper with a worked example
> embedded.
>
> Furthermore, it does not seem to me that there is an active research
> program, at least. I'm pretty sure I read the first article some time
> ago, and the second examples have the strings "Version 20041215" and
> "version 20041029" which strongly suggests that they are from 2004 (I
> also recall seeing these or similar from at least that time frame).
>
> I recall an email thread twixt me and Adrian wherein he explicitly
> said that he didn't have formal studies:
>
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-sws-ig/2005Jul/0007.html
>
> """The problem can get worse with rule systems, if we stick to the
> techie notations that us techies know and love.  Or it can be
> mitigated, if we make sure that the person writing the rules has to
> document what they mean at the real world business level.  If this is
> done by including lightweight English in the rules themselves, the
> rules and the documentation cannot get out of step.  We can also get
> English explanations of the reasoning.
>
> We don't yet have HCI  studies to say whether this is a good
> approach. As you said elsewhere in your posting, such studies are
> hard to do, and sometimes inconclusive.  However, a system** that
> supports the approach is live, online.  So, one can get an idea of
> the 'value proposition' (ouch!) by viewing and running the RDF and
> other examples provided.  One can also use a browser to write and run
> one's own examples.  Non-commercial use of the system is free.""""
>
> (Note, that this was specifically in the context of the need for
> explanations, and explanations in NL.)
>
> I don't mind advocacy, and often proof is in the pudding and the
> proving is in the eating. I personally am happy to document my own
> idiosyncratic and native speaker reactions. But can we *please* not
> pollute the discussion space with such misclassification and
> hyperbole? In either direction? (E.g., Pat's skepticism about NL/CNL
> techniques also carries no water with me and I *am also* suspicious,
> by inclination, of NL/CNL techniques!).
>
> I know four things in this area:
>         1) our pilot study was surprisingly promising for understanding
> (so,
> search results; verification by domain experts, etc.)
>         2) someone reported using Swoop's NLP view for verification and
> even
> correction by domain experts (that last part I don't understand quite
> as we don't provide a parser)
>         3) I know that there are ontology building teams that make use of
> stilted NL toward CNL as a core part of their methodology with crappy
> tool support
>         4) Some users have expressed some happiness at Manchester syntax,
> though there have been reports that it's still "too logicy"
>
> I thought the last was mentioned by the presenter of this paper:
>         <http://owl-workshop.man.ac.uk/acceptedLong/submission_30.pdf>
>
> (Which is well worth reading, folks! And it includes a study study :))
>
> But I cannot find this in the paper itself. So I'm unsure about 4.
>
> (The paper is a good reminder that, well, our tools suck. I say this
> as a toolbuilder! I can see places in the paper where I can predict
> how swoop would do, and it's not pretty :) Sigh. I mostly know, I
> think, how to fix a lot of it, but it's also true that Swoop was not
> designed for "normal" users. Though I don't know how "normal" the
> users are if they are comfortable in an Eclipse based environment :)).
>
> Cheers,
> Bijan.
>