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

Giorgos Stamou wrote:

> As I explained in my previous e-mail, it is much better to seriously
> consider starting this work from the beginning, since it is very important
> for this effort to follow all the phases of the work done within the WG.

That's fair enough. I'm just concerned to limit the scope of the 
charter, where possible, to help the group complete its first round in 
reasonable time and to ensure that those features that are included are 
throughly examined by the whole working group.

> I agree that the compatibility issue with RDF and OWL is very important and
> I am looking forward to see how the new charter defines this compatibility.
> In any case, a lot of work has been done in the area of fuzzy description
> logics and could be used in the proposed effort. Some papers are cited in my
> first e-mail from which you can find several references. 

I appreciate that much work has been done in the area. My question was 
whether that work was generally regarded as sufficiently complete. Is 
the overall community comfortable that the research issues have been 
resolved, that it is reasonably accepted that fuzzy logic is the 
appropriate uncertainty representation for the semantic web and that the 
time is ripe for standardization around that.

That's a genuine question, not a rhetorical device.

Is this a question we could pose to the Semantic Web Best Practices 
working group?

For good or ill, the emphasis of the draft charter is not on an 
implementable language but on an interlingua for exchange of rules 
between existing systems. It's not clear that the uncertainty use cases 
really fall into the interlingua remit. I would have thought that the 
issues of successful exchange and integration of rules involving 
uncertainty reasoning would be much greater that those of simply using 
fuzzy inference within a single system. Whereas the use cases seemed to 
want an implemented language they could use without a particular need 
for rule exchange.

 >> [der]
>>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.
> 
> 
> [Giorgos Stamou] 
> The document I sent to Sandro leaves this issue quite open.

The stated requirement to "generalize the two-valued Boolean logic of 
{0,1} into the interval [0,1]" seemed somewhat directed towards a fuzzy 
logic solution.

> We just need the industry requirements expressed in the Workshop and
> strongly motivated the need for uncertainty and fuzziness, to be reflected
> in the charter and hopefully this issue to be put with some few words in the
> scope of the WG charter as a desired language extension. 

There are several industry requirements that are not reflected in the 
draft charter. I agree that this one is worthy of consideration but am 
less certain it is clear cut that it should included in the first round 
give the current emphasis on an interlingua.

Dave

Received on Sunday, 11 September 2005 16:44:33 UTC