- From: Adrian Walker <adrianw@snet.net>
- Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 16:49:14 -0400
- To: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@isr.umd.edu>
- Cc: www-rdf-rules@w3.org, public-rule-workshop-discuss@w3.org
Hi Bijan -- Thanks for your further comments on authoring, reasoning, and explanations. I have taken some time to read your paper -- http://www.mindswap.org/papers/debugging-jws.pdf -- hence the delay in this reply. First let me say that I'm impressed that your paper contains a useability study. That's rare and valuable. My take on your paper is that we addressing complementary parts of the authoring/debugging problem. In SWOOP/PELLET + debug, you focus on internal inconsistencies in an ontology, and you explicitly set aside any attempt to help the author with the "subtler" problems of inferences that (a) happened and should not have , and (b) that should have happened but did not. In our INTERNET BUSINESS LOGIC system, we are mainly concerned with exactly those "subtler" problems. We are also trying to be helpful to inexperienced authors, whereas your focus is on folks with at least 9 months' experience of OWL. So, for example, our system will explain in hypertexted English why an unintended inference happened. It will similarly explain why an intended inference did not happen. To be picky, I'm concerned that while the SWOOP-PELLET GUI looks nice, in Figure 3 in your paper you had to add a hand-written English explanation of what the figure means. That could be taken as an argument for expressing the knowledge in the ontology in lightweight English in the first place, so that the machine can produce an English explanation. What do you think? Thanks for taking the time to look at our system (at reengineeringllc.com). You wrote that you found the example """customer some-cust-number is on the some-type plan effective some-plan-start-date that-plan-start-date is less than or equal some-current-date not : customer that-cust-number has switched plans between that-plan-start-date and that-current-date """" to be less than natural English. You are right. For lightweight *open* vocabulary English like this, there *is* a trade off. It's sort of like following a mountain path with a cliff to the left and a canyon to the right. The cliff is Full Natural Language Processing, that no-one seems to know how to do robustly and with feasible maintainability. The canyon is, er, techie notations like raw OWL. Clearly, a GUI like SWOOP is another way of finding such a "cliff path" between AI-complete problems on the left and machine-oriented human-unreadable stuff on the right. You wrote also: "My current belief is that it's hopeless to expect (most) end-users to be able to handle any sort of direct authoring of rules. They could maybe do wizards and forms, depending. But any \"just write it down\" seems like a hopeless non-starter." Well, yes, you need a certain amount of skill level. But less than 9 months' worth (:-) A business analyst writing a spreadsheet is perhaps a useful example to compare to? To see why it may be useful to close up the gap between business folks and techies, consider the following, from http://www.financetech.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=163701206 "Now, data truly is ubiquitous, touching all corners of an enterprise and becoming the lifeblood of an organization. Not only must data managers be savvy technologists capable of keeping that information pure and pumping it through the corporate veins, they also must be able to speak the language of business. They must be astute business advisers and diplomats who understand not only the data, but also the business lines they serve - including equities, fixed income and derivatives - as well as the problems business line managers face." So, how about OWL-LE ? (OWL plus lightweight English) (:-) Cheers, -- Adrian
Received on Tuesday, 12 July 2005 20:49:22 UTC