Re: Extensibility: Fallback vs. Monolithic

On Jun 27, 2007, at 11:56 AM, Axel Polleres wrote:
[snip]
> a) ignoring X will lead to sound inferences only but inferences
>    might be incomplete
> b) ignoring Y will lead preserve completeness but unsound inferences
>    might arise
> c) ignoring z will neither preserve soundness nor completeness
>
> etc.
> while the latter two are probvably pointless,
[snip]

Since I don't know exactly what's being ignored, my conversations  
with various users, esp. those working on biology, certainly suggest  
that B is to be preferred to A (i.e., they *really* don't want to  
miss answers, and in their case it's pretty easy to check for  
spuriousness, and, typically, the likelihood of false positives is low).

Similarly, if I just need *an* answer (not every answer) but I need  
it quickly, c could be fine as long as 1) the probability of some  
correct answer, if there is one, being in the answer set is high and  
2) the answer set isn't to big and 3) I can check for correctness  
well enough or the consequence of the occasional wrong answer is low.

And of course, if my overall probability of error due to (inherent)  
unsoundness or incompleteness plus the chance of a bug in my reasoner  
is much less than the chance of a bug in an inherently sound and  
complete reasoner, well, that's a reason to prefer the former.

I imagine that life is easier all around if the ignoring is  
standardized. It's probably a bit easier to explain to users that the  
system "ignores these bits and reasons with the rest" than to explain  
how some particular approximation technique works in other terms. Oh,  
and clearly a is the easiest to explain because of examples like  
yours. It's also easier to get interoperability since you can require  
soundness and completeness for the pruned document.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Wednesday, 27 June 2007 22:54:05 UTC