Re: Comments to Rules Working Group Charter Draft $Revision: 1.60$ (Part II)

Giorgos Stamou wrote:

> 2.x Uncertainty and fuzziness
> 
>  
> 
> It would be useful for the language to be able to represent uncertain 
> and vague information. Thus, the extension of the core language with 
> uncertainty reasoning and fuzzy logic capabilities will be provided. A 
> requirement for this extension is that it should generalize the 
> two-valued Boolean logic of {0,1} into the interval [0,1], by providing 
> a sound extension of Boolean logic. Hence, such a feature should not 
> affect applications that do not require the specification of uncertainty.

Whilst the presence of such a feature need not affect applications that
don't use it, developing it could be a noticeable extra burden on the
working group. It might be better left to a later phase.

First, any solution doesn't just have to work with rules. The charter
requires interoperability with RDF and OWL and so the WG would need to
explain how the uncertainty representation affected those as well. Has
there been enough work done on combining DLs with uncertainty calculi to
be confident of the right way to do that?

Second, whilst I agree that fuzzy logic is well understood and is suited to 
use in rules, is it really so clear cut that it is the correct uncertainty 
representation to standardize? The use cases described at the workshop 
seemed be evidence combination problems that I would naively have expected 
to be as well suited to, say, a probabilistic approach.

Perhaps you just need the charter to say that the WG should not preclude 
experimental extensions which provide an uncertainty calculus and which may 
be the subject of a future round of standardization.

Dave
"... keep it simple ..."

Received on Friday, 9 September 2005 16:21:22 UTC